A Hybrid Multicast-Unicast Infrastructure for Efficient Publish-Subscribe in Enterprise Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid multicast-unicast framework for enterprise publish-subscribe systems, optimizing resource use by combining both methods and outperforming traditional solutions through extensive simulations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel hybrid dissemination framework and algorithms for optimal mapping, improving resource efficiency in large-scale enterprise publish-subscribe networks.

Findings

Reduces host and network resource consumption

Outperforms traditional multicast or unicast solutions

Validated with simulations based on real-world data

Abstract

One of the main challenges in building a large scale publish-subscribe infrastructure in an enterprise network, is to provide the subscribers with the required information, while minimizing the consumed host and network resources. Typically, previous approaches utilize either IP multicast or point-to-point unicast for efficient dissemination of the information. In this work, we propose a novel hybrid framework, which is a combination of both multicast and unicast data dissemination. Our hybrid framework allows us to take the advantages of both multicast and unicast, while avoiding their drawbacks. We investigate several algorithms for computing the best mapping of publishers' transmissions into multicast and unicast transport. Using extensive simulations, we show that our hybrid framework reduces consumed host and network resources, outperforming traditional solutions. To insure the subscribers interests closely resemble those of real-world settings, our simulations are based on stock market data and on recorded IBM WebShpere subscriptions.