VAST: A Decentralized Open-Source Publish/Subscribe Architecture

Abstract

Publish/Subscribe (pub/sub) systems have been widely adopted in highly scalable environments. We see this especially with IoT/IIoT applications, an environment where low bandwidth and high latency is ideal. The projected growth of Iot/IIoT network nodes are in the billions in the next few years and as such, there is a need for network communication standards that can adapt to the evergrowing nature of this industry. While current pub/sub standards have produced positive results so far, they all adopt a "topic" based pub/sub approach. They do not leverage off modern devices having spatial information. Current open-source standards also focus heavily on centralized brokering of information. This makes the broker in this system a potential bottleneck as it means if that broker goes down, the entire network goes down. We have developed a new, unique and innovative open-source pub/sub standard called VAST that leverages spatial information of modern network devices to perform message communication. It uses a unique concept called Spatial Publish/Subscribe (SPS). It is built on a peer-to-peer network to enable high scalability. In addition to this, it provides a Voronoi Overlay to efficiently distribute the messages, ensuring that network brokers are not overloaded with requests and ensures the network self-organizes itself if one or more brokers break down. It also has a forwarding algorithm to eliminate redundancies in the network. We will demonstrate this concept with a simulator we developed. We will show how the simulator works and how to use it. We believe that with this simulator, we will help encourage researchers adopt this technology for their spatial applications. An example of such is Massively Multi-user Virtual Environments (MMVEs), where there is a need for a high number of spatial network nodes in virtual environments.