Publish-subscribe based middleware for heterogeneous critical infrastructure systems communication.

Abstract

Critical Infrastructures (CIs) are physical assets and organizations responsible for the production and distribution of society’s vital goods and services. The increasing interconnection of CIs has resulted in interdependencies which effect the propagation of failure from one infrastructure to another. Therefore a publish-subscribe based communication system for dissimilar CIs is presented. The proposed system improves the manageability of CIs by providing an exchange medium for status information and alerts. It achieves this via a uniform architecture within and across infrastructure boundaries, that maintains data restrictions that reflect real life organizational, administrative, and policy boundaries. Finally the proposed system is modeled using the OMNET++ simulation framework, and a network performance study investigating scalability is presented. Scalability was found to depend on service time per packet, subscription density, and number of clients per router. However, further work in the areas of QoS management, reliability/robustness, security, and network optimization is required.