An efficient multicast protocol for content-based publish-subscribe systems

• Main Authors: Banavar, G., Chandra, T., Mukherjee, B., Nagarajarao, J., Strom, R.E., Sturman, D.C.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Electrical capacitance tomography; Floods; Matched filters; Milling machines; Multicast algorithms; Multicast protocols; Publish-subscribe; Rivers; Table lookup; Wide area networks
• ISSN: 1063-6927; 2575-8411
• DOI: 10.1109/ICDCS.1999.776528

The publish/subscribe (or pub/sub) paradigm is an increasingly popular model for interconnecting applications in a distributed environment. Many existing pub/sub systems are based on pre-defined subjects, and hence are able to exploit multicast technologies to provide scalability and availability. An emerging alternative to subject-based systems, known as content-based systems, allow information consumers to request events based on the content of published events. This model is considerably more flexible than subject-based pub/sub. However, it was previously not known how to efficiently multicast published events to interested content-based subscribers within a large and geographically distributed network of broker (or router) machines. We develop and evaluate a novel and efficient distributed algorithm for this purpose, called -link matching". Link matching performs just enough computation at each node to determine the subset of links to which an event should be forwarded. We show via simulations that: link matching yields higher throughput than flooding when subscriptions are selective; and the overall CPU utilization of link matching is comparable to that of centralized matching.