Magnet: Practical Subscription Clustering for Internet-Scale Publish/Subscribe

Abstract

An effective means for building Internet-scale distributed applications, and in particular those involving group-based information sharing, is to deploy peer-to-peer overlay networks. The key pre-requisite for supporting these types of applications on top of the overlays is efficient distribution of messages to multiple subscribers dispersed across numerous multicast groups. In this paper, we introduce Magnet: a peer-to-peer publish/subscribe system which achieves efficient message distribution by dynamically organizing peers with similar subscriptions into dissemination structures which preserve locality in the subscription space. Magnet is able to significantly reduce the message propagation costs by taking advantage of subscription correlations present in many large-scale group-based applications. We evaluate Magnet by comparing its performance against a strawman pub/sub system which does not cluster similar subscriptions by simulation. We find that Magnet outperforms the strawman by a substantial margin on clustered subscription workloads produced using both generative models and real application traces.