LIPSIN

Abstract

A large fraction of today's Internet applications are internally publish/subscribe in nature; the current architecture makes it cumbersome and inept to support them. In essence, supporting efficient publish/subscribe requires data-oriented naming, efficient multicast, and in-network caching. Deployment of native IP-based multicast has failed, and overlay-based multicast systems are inherently inefficient. We surmise that scalable and efficient publish/subscribe will require substantial architectural changes, such as moving from endpoint-oriented systems to information-centric architectures. In this paper, we propose a novel multicast forwarding fabric, suitable for large-scale topic-based publish/subscribe. Due to very simple forwarding decisions and small forwarding tables, the fabric may be more energy efficient than the currently used ones. To understand the limitations and potential, we provide efficiency and scalability analysis via simulations and early measurements from our two implementations. We show that the system scales up to metropolitan WAN sizes, and we discuss how to interconnect separate networks.