Mockets: A Novel Message-Oriented Communications Middleware for the Wireless Internet

Wireless networking is becoming increasingly important for ubiquitous access to the Internet and the Web. However, wireless networks exhibit significant reliability and performance problems, with frequent disconnections, congestions, and packet losses. For these reasons, the traditional TCP/IP suite, designed for wired networks, offers poor performance and inadequate communication semantics in this scenario. There are several research efforts in both protocols and communication infrastructures aimed at producing solutions better suited to wireless network characteristics. This paper presents Mockets, a novel communications middleware specifically designed for wireless networking scenarios. The Mockets middleware permits a communication endpoint to be moved from one node to another without interrupting the communication session. In addition, Mockets provides several delivery services with different communication semantics, semantic classification of data, cancellation/replacement of enqueued data, and priority/lifetime assignment to messages. Initial experimental results in a wireless network scenario show that the Mockets middleware achieves better performance levels than traditional TCP-based infrastructure.