Minimal broker overlay design for content-based publish/subscribe systems

Mission-critical distributed applications, such as Internet advertising platforms, increasingly utilize distributed publish/subscribe systems as a messaging substrate for information dissemination. These applications require low latency performance from the substrate, as the timely delivery of messages can have a direct impact on revenue. The cost of managing and operating distributed publish/subscribe systems, however, can be prohibitive due to system size and scale. It is, therefore, critical to derive low latency message delivery from a minimal set of system resources. To this end, this paper presents a solution for designing low latency, minimal-broker overlay networks for content-based publish/subscribe systems. The solution is developed in two parts. First, a framework is developed to quantify the similarity of entities in content-based publish/subscribe systems. Second, algorithms are presented for designing overlays that utilize a minimal number of brokers in order to provide low latency performance at reduced cost.