Scaling construction of low fan-out overlays for topic-based publish/subscribe systems

It is a key challenge and fundamental problem in the design of distributed publish/subscribe systems to construct the underlying dissemination overlay. In this paper, we focus on effective practical solution for the MinMax-TCO problem: Create a topic-connected pub/sub overlay in which all nodes interested in the same topic are organized in a directly connected dissemination sub-overlay while keeping the maximum node degree to the minimum. Previously known solutions provided an extensive analysis of the problem and an algorithm that achieves a logarithmic approximation for MinMax-TCO. Yet, they did not focus on efficiency of the solution or feasibility of decentralized operation that would not require full knowledge of the system. Compared to these solutions, our proposed algorithm produces an overlay with marginally higher degrees. At the same time, it has drastically reduced runtime cost, which is corroborated by both theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation. The latter shows a speedup by a factor of more than 25 on average for typical pub/sub workloads.