Achieving reliable and timely event dissemination over WAN

The design of large-scale critical infrastructures demands for innovative data dissemination services, able to jointly provide reliability and timeliness guarantees. Current middleware solutions do not address both these aspects. Indeed, fault tolerance is typically achieved at the cost of severe performance fluctuations, or timeliness is always obtained by softening the fault-tolerance requirements. In this paper we propose to fulfill this lack by combining two different approaches, namely coding and gossiping. We provide a theoretical model to evaluate the potential benefit of coding on the information delivery performance. These results are also confirmed by an experimental analysis conducted on a real air traffic control workload, which evidences how coding mitigates latency and overhead penalties to ensure reliable event notification.