Vitis: A Gossip-based Hybrid Overlay for Internet-scale Publish/Subscribe Enabling Rendezvous Routing in Unstructured Overlay Networks

Peer-to-peer overlay networks are attractive solutions for building Internet-scale publish/subscribe systems. However, scalability comes with a cost: a message published on a certain topic often needs to traverse a large number of uninterested (unsubscribed) nodes before reaching all its subscribers. This might sharply increase resource consumption for such relay nodes (in terms of bandwidth transmission cost, CPU, etc) and could ultimately lead to rapid deterioration of the system's performance once the relay nodes start dropping the messages or choose to permanently abandon the system. In this paper, we introduce Vitis, a gossip-based publish/subscribe system that significantly decreases the number of relay messages, and scales to an unbounded number of nodes and topics. This is achieved by the novel approach of enabling rendezvous routing on unstructured overlays. We construct a hybrid system by injecting structure into an otherwise unstructured network. The resulting structure resembles a navigable small-world network, which spans along clusters of nodes that have similar subscriptions. The properties of such an overlay make it an ideal platform for efficient data dissemination in large-scale systems. We perform extensive simulations and evaluate Vitis by comparing its performance against two base-line publish/subscribe systems: one that is oblivious to node subscriptions, and another that exploits the subscription similarities. Our measurements show that Vitis significantly outperforms the base-line solutions on various subscription and churn scenarios, from both synthetic models and real-world traces.