National “Push notifications” service

Abstract

Notifications are useful and necessary for various purposes: informing users of events important to them, promotions, offers; keeping them updated on security problem solutions and system updates. In many cases, these notifications need to be almost real-time in applications that do not need to be active to receive them. For these purposes, there are several proprietary platforms mainly from Google, Huawei, and Apple. However, in several cases, it is not possible to use them due to owner restrictions. This work was carried out to identify if there is any free and open-source software alternative to offer this service to national institutions and application developers. Also, to analyze the different alternatives according to a set of requirements and determine to what degree each one is satisfied and which is more feasible to implement in a mass service environment. For this, in addition to comparing a group of these alternatives, a set of tests were carried out to validate the correct performance in high-demand environments and with a user base of over 100,000 users connected simultaneously. As a result of this work, at least one alternative was identified to offer this service and gain technological independence and sovereignty.