Optimizing publish/subscribe systems with congestion handling

Abstract

Despite its success, the Internet suffers from major shortcomings. Nowadays there is lot of attention toward changing the Internet architecture, in different layers to cope to challenges of high traffic demands and new types of applications. One of the architectural alternatives is changing client-server communication paradigm of original Internet to a Publish/subscribe communication paradigm. Since studying this new paradigm as well as any other architectural changes toward future Internet, should be done on top of TCP/IP stack, studying and experimenting of this new paradigm has been done over overlay networks. Overlay networks are new approach of academia to study and implement all kind of new services that are not possible or are difficult to be implemented on Internet network layer.

The new paradigm itself faces some difficulties. The goal of this thesis was to look at congestion problem of publish/subscribe paradigm; Design and test a system to address congestion handling requirements of publish/subscribe systems and some of their Quality of service requirements with respect to congestion situation.

The results of the design are evaluated against the given requirements. Different design alternatives are introduced and analyzed in order to rationalize the design. A reference implementation is developed as a proof of concept.

The outcome of the design meets the requirements. The new model increases the control over the congestion and some quality of service requirements on a given pub/sub system. The work brought up some future work items on testing new models for better congestion management and also testing other Quality of service requirements.