Formal analysis and novel protocol designs

The content-based communication model is a form of communication service based on the idea that information should be transmitted to receivers based on their interests rather than on explicit destinations set by senders. The model works as follows: (1) receivers tell the service what they are interested in by declaring a predicate that, applied to a message, determines whether that message is of interest to the receiver; (2) senders simply send messages, without specifying a destination address; (3) the service delivers each message from the sender to all the receivers that declared predicates matching the content of the message. Thus, a content-based communication service acts both as a traditional communication mechanism, transmitting information from senders to receivers, and as an information broker, selecting information of interest on behalf of the receivers. The content-based communication model has received a lot of attention in recent years thanks to its utility in a wide range of applications and domains. These include information dissemination, system monitoring and management, e-government, and generally speaking every application that is content-driven and distributed in nature.

In the past few years we have formulated and developed the concept of a content-based network, which is a distributed implementation of the content-based communication model. In particular, we have defined a general service interface and a network architecture, and we have designed some foundational components of that architecture, including a routing protocol and a forwarding protocol. This project is a direct continuation along this line of research. Specifically, we intend to focus on the problem of content-based routing, which we believe remains an open research area. Specifically, we propose to revisit and improve content-based routing for special-purpose networks such as wireless sensor networks. On a parallel track, we intend to study the fundamental properties and limitations of content-based routing.