Patent ID: 8271657

Claim:
A method for selecting an appropriate transport mechanism for communication in a network, the method being implemented by a publisher node in the network, the method comprising: determining, by the publisher node, how many subscriber nodes in the network have subscribed to receive notification messages about data that is maintained by the publisher node; determining, by the publisher node, how many available connections the publisher node is configured to support; obtaining, by the publisher node, quality of service requirements from a plurality of the subscriber nodes indicating how important it is for the subscriber node to receive each notification message; sending the notification messages to the subscriber nodes via a connection-based protocol when the number of available connections exceeds the number of subscriber nodes; sending the notification messages to the subscriber nodes via multicast when the number of subscriber nodes exceeds the number of available connections; sending the notification messages to a subset of the subscriber nodes via a connection-based protocol when the notification messages are sent to the subscriber nodes via multicast; receiving a connection request from a requesting subscriber node when the publisher node sends the notification messages to the subscriber nodes via multicast; and determining whether to accept the connection request.