Infrastructure Provisioning for Scalable Content-based Routing: Framework and Analysis

Content-based publish/subscribe is an attractive paradigm for designing large-scale systems, as it decouples producers of information from consumers. This provides extensive flexibility for applications, which can use a modular architecture. Using this architecture, each participant expresses its interest in events by means of filters on the content of those events instead of using pre-established communication channels. However, matching events against filters has a non-negligible processing cost. Scaling the infrastructure with the number of users or events requires appropriate provisioning of resources for each of the operations involved: routing and filtering. In this paper, we propose and describe a generic, modular, and scalable infrastructure for supporting high-performance content-based publish/subscribe. We analyze its properties and show how it dynamically scales in a realistic setting. Our results provide valuable insights into the design and deployment of scalable content-based routing infrastructures.