Building content-based publish/subscribe systems with distributed hash tables

Abstract

Building distributed content-based publish/subscribe systems has remained a challenge. Existing solutions typically use a relatively small set of trusted computers as brokers, which may lead to scalability concerns for large Internet-scale workloads. Moreover, since each broker maintains state for a large number of users, it may be difficult to tolerate faults at each broker. In this paper we propose an approach to building content-based publish/subscribe systems on top of distributed hash table (DHT) systems. DHT systems have been effectively used for scalable and fault-tolerant resource lookup in large peer-to-peer networks. Our approach provides predicate-based query semantics and supports constrained range queries. Experimental evaluation shows that our approach is scalable to thousands of brokers, although proper tuning is required. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.