Context Broker Federation

This section described "push" federation (in the sense notifyContext sent by one Orion instance are processed by other Orion instance). However, the Context Providers and request forwarding functionality can be used to implement a kind of "pull" federation (in which one Orion instance forwards a query/update to another Orion instance). Note that an important difference between two approaches is that in the "push" mode all the Orion instances update its local state, while in the "pull" approach all the intermediate Orion instances acts as "proxy" without storing the data locally.

Apart from processing updates (usually issued by a client application) Orion Context Broker can process notifications with the same semantics. This opens the door to interesting federation scenarios (one example is the FIWARE Lab context management platform).

Let's illustrate with an example. Consider the following setup: three context broker instances running in the same machine (of course, this is not a requirement but makes things simpler to test this feature), in ports 1030, 1031 and 1032 respectively and using different databases (named A, B and C to be brief). Let's start each instance (run each command in a separate terminal):

contextBroker -fg -port 1030 -db orion1030
contextBroker -fg -port 1031 -db orion1031
contextBroker -fg -port 1032 -db orion1032

Next, let's send create a subscription in A (to make B subscribe to updates made in A). Note that the URL used in the reference has to be "/v2/op/notify":

curl localhost:1030/v2/subscriptions -s -S -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d @- <<EOF
{
  "subject": {
    "entities": [
      {
        "id": "Room1",
        "type": "Room"
      }
    ],
    "condition": {
      "attrs": [
        "temperature"
      ]
    }
  },
  "notification": {
    "http": {
      "url": "http://localhost:1031/v2/op/notify"
    }
  }
}
EOF

Next, let's send a create a subscription in B (to make C subscribe to updates made in B). The subscription is basically the same, only the port in the curl line and reference elements are different.

curl localhost:1031/v2/subscriptions -s -S -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d @- <<EOF
{
  "subject": {
    "entities": [
      {
        "id": "Room1",
        "type": "Room"
      }
    ],
    "condition": {
      "attrs": [
        "temperature"
      ]
    }
  },
  "notification": {
    "http": {
      "url": "http://localhost:1032/v2/op/notify"
    }
  }
}
EOF

Now, let's create an entity in context broker A.

curl localhost:1030/v2/entities -s -S -H'Content-Type: application/json' -d @- <<EOF
{
  "id": "Room1",
  "type": "Room",
  "temperature": {
    "value": 23,
    "type": "Number"
  }
}
EOF

Given the subscriptions in place, a notification is automatically sent from A to B. That event at B causes in sequence a notification to be sent to C. So, at the end, the creation of an entity in A causes the creation of the same entity (with the same attribute values) in C. You can check it by doing a query to C:

curl localhost:1032/v2/entities -s -S H-header 'Accept: application/json' -d @- | python -mjson.tool

which response is:

[
  {
    "id": "Room1",
    "type": "Room",
    "temperature": {
      "value": 23,
      "type": "Number"
    }
  }
]

The semantics of the notification request are the same than POST /v2/entities?options=upsert. So, if the entity exists, is upated. If the entities doesn't exist, it is created. Thus, federation doesn't provide exact mirroring: if the entity is deleted in first Context Broker the entity will not be deleted in the second Context Broker.

Note that Orion Context Broker could send an initial notification when the federation subscription is done. In some cases, this initial notification could be unprocessable by the receiver Context Broker. In particular, we have found cases in which the initial notification includes more elements in the service path headers than the legally allowed (see documentation about service path), thus generating a "too many service paths - a maximum of ten service paths is allowed" error. However, note that only this initial notification is ignored, regular notifications after it doesn't have this problems and are correctly processed by the receiving Context Broker.