A Generalized Algorithm for Publish/Subscribe Overlay Design and Its Fast Implementation

Abstract

It is a challenging and fundamental problem to construct the underlying overlay network to support efficient and scalable information distribution in topic-based publish/subscribe systems. Existing overlay design algorithms aim to minimize the node fan-out while building topic-connected overlays, in which all nodes interested in the same topic are organized in a directly connected dissemination sub-overlay. However, most state-of-the-art algorithms suffer from high computational complexity, such as O(|V|⁴|T|), where V is the node set and T is the topic set.

We devise a general indexing data structure that provides a significantly faster implementation, with O(|V|²|T|) running time, for different state-of-the-art algorithms. The generality of the indexing data structure is due to the fact that it enables edge lookup by both node degree and edge contribution, a central metric in all existing algorithms. When tested on typical pub/sub workloads, the speedup observed was by a factor of over 1 000, thereby rendering the algorithms more suitable for practical use. For example, under a typically Zipf distributed pub/sub workload, with 1 000 nodes and 100 topics, our new implementation completes in 3.823 seconds, while the previous alternative takes over 555 minutes.