JMS for opportunistic networks

Opportunistic networks constitute an appealing solution to complement fixed network infrastructures – or make up for the lack thereof – in challenged areas. Although many papers published in the last few years address the problem of supporting message dissemination in opportunistic networks, very little of them consider the problem of designing distributed applications capable of running in such networks. This article presents JOMS (Java Opportunistic Message Service), a carefully designed message-oriented middleware (MOM) system that is meant to ease the development of opportunistic distributed applications. JOMS fully supports the standard Java Message Service (JMS) specification, but unlike other JMS providers it implements a server-less model: message queues, topics, and a directory service are fully distributed among mobile devices, which collaborate to share information network-wide. JOMS has been evaluated in real conditions using netbooks and Android-based smartphones. The results of this evaluation are also presented in this article.