NoSQL Data Stores In Publish/Subscribe-Based RESTful Web Services

Abstract

In the era of mobile cloud computing, the consumption of virtualized software and Web-based services from super-back-end infrastructure using smartphones and tablets is gaining much research attention from both the industry and academia. Nowadays, these mobile devices generate and access multimedia data hosted in social media and other sources in order to enhance the users’ multimedia experience. However, multimedia data is unstructured which can lead to challenges with data synchronization between these mobile devices and the cloud computing back-end. The issue with data synchronization is further fueled by the fact that mobile devices can experience intermittent connectivity losses due to unstable wireless bandwidths. While previous works proposed Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) -based middleware for the Web services’ synchronization, this approach is not efficient in a mobile environment because the SOAP protocol is verbose. Thus, the Representational State Transfer (REST) standard has been proposed recently to model the Web services since it is lightweight. This thesis proposes a novel approach for implementing a REST-based mobile Web Service for multimedia file sharing that utilizes a channel-based publish/subscribe communication scheme to synchronize smartphone or tablet-hosted NoSQL databases with a cloud-hosted NoSQL database. This thesis evaluates the synchronicity and the scalability of a prototype system that was implemented according to this approach. Also, this thesis assesses the overhead of the middleware component of the system.