Fuzzy logic-based approximate event notification in sparse MANETs

Abstract

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) are an important communication infrastructure to support emergency and rescue operations. To address the frequent disconnections and network partitions that might occur, we have developed a distributed event notification service (DENS) for sparse MANETs. In most event notification solutions, subscriptions are formed with crisp values or crisp value ranges. However, in emergency and rescue operations subscribers may not always have time to give crisp values or crisp value ranges. Moreover, subscriber's interests in queries have gradual nature and subjective measure that calls for computing by words. Therefore, we design and implement a simple fuzzy concept based subscription language allowing more expressive subscriptions and more sophisticated event-filtering. It is built on two new ideas: using features as multi-attribute indexes of the subscription and predicate patterns for processing subscriptions with arbitrary Boolean operators. However, requiring more computational efforts, fuzzy logic introduces performance penalties in the whole network. The proposed services have been evaluated for run-time, space and scalability efficiency. The proposed design framework is extensible to the user- and application-semantics and configurable to the dynamics in data that publish/subscribe paradigm imposes at runtime.