Publiy ⁺: A peer-assisted publish/subscribe service for timely dissemination of bulk content

Publish/Subscribe (P/S) systems and file sharing applications traditionally share the common goal of disseminating data among large populations of users. Despite this similarity, the former focuses on timely dissemination of small-sized notification messages, while the latter presumes larger types of bulk content with less emphasis on the time needed between release and delivery of data. In this paper, we develop a peer-assisted content dissemination mechanism to bridge this gap by adopting the P/S model. We propose a hybrid two-layer architecture in which P/S brokers act as coordinators and guide their clients with interest in similar content to engage in direct exchange of data blocks in a peer-to-peer and cooperative fashion. Furthermore, we use network coding in order to facilitate data exchange among clients. Our peer-assisted scheme offloads the burden of disseminating huge volumes of data from P/S brokers to subscribers themselves. As an added advantage of our approach, brokers employ strategies that help shape traffic flows in multi-domain network settings. Finally, we have implemented our approach and carried out extensive large-scale experimental evaluation on a cluster with aggregate data transfers of up to 1 TB and involving up to 1000 subscribers. Our results demonstrate good scalability and faster content delivery compared to file sharing protocols such as BitTorrent.