InfoBus repeater is a Java-based middleware for publish/subscribe type of communication. It has the following features:

1. InfoBus-compatible APIs for pulish/subscribe communication
2. RMTP(Reliable Multicast Transport Protocol) for large-scale delivery of events
3. Public key-based security

InfoBus repeater Architecture is here.

InfoBus is a middleware developed by Lotus for communication between Java beans in a Java Virtual Machine(JVM). It supports asynchronous and syjmmetric communication. But it dose not support communication between JVMs.

By connecting InfoBuses in distributed JVMs, InfoBus repeater enables Java beans to communicate with beans in other JVMs. A repeater joined to each InforBus can exchange messages with other repeaters via hub. It uses InfoBus API. With InfoBus repeater, you can use existing InfoBus Applications in distributed environments without any modification.

Using a peer-to-peer communication protocol such as TCP will be inefficient when the number of recipients gets large. To cope with this salability problem, we adopted RMTP for underlying transport.

Reliable Multicast Transport Protocol(RMTP) is a transport control mechanism to enable reliable data transfer to a large number (in the order of 5,000 to 10,000) of receivers on a TCP/IP network from a sender in parallel. It uses IP multicast function as its delivery system. It has the following features:

• data transport reliability based on retransmission
• handshake-based session control
• the sender application notification of the transmission success for changing information

Practical applications require a mechanism enabling a authorized receiver to receive massages from a sender for only paticular period. Data encription is suitable for that situation.

Secure Socket Layer(SSL), becoming a general practice, provides authenticity, confidentiality, and integrity of messages. But there is no SSL counterpart in pulish/subscribe communication. One of the reasons is the difficulty of managing keys among a large number of recipients.

We developed a new key managemant scheme that enables very efficient session-key updates and applied it to InfoBus repeater.