Adaptive Content-based Routing using Subscription Subgrouping in Structured Overlays

Abstract: Cyclic or general overlays may provide multiple paths between publishers and subscribers. However, an advertisement tree and a matching subscription activates only one path for notifications routing in publish/subscribe systems. This poses serious challenges in handling network conditions like congestion, and link or broker failures. Further, content-based dynamic routing of notifications requires instantaneous updates in routing paths, which is not a scalable option. This paper introduces a clustering approach with a bit-vector technique for inter-cluster dynamic routing of notifications in a structured cyclic topology that provides multiple paths between publishers and interested subscribers. The advertisement forwarding process exploits the structured nature of the overlay topology to generate advertisement trees of length 1 without generating duplicate messages in the advertisement forwarding process. Issued subscriptions are divided into multiple disjoint subgropus, where each subscription is broadcast to a cluster, which is a limited part of the structured cyclic overlay network. We implemented novel static and intra-cluster dynamic routing algorithms in the proposed overlay topology for our advertisement-based publish/subscribe system, called OctopiA. We also performed a pragmatic comparison of our two algorithms with the state-of-the-art. Experiments on a cluster testbed show that our approach generates fewer inter-broker messages, and is scalable.