The Use of Content-Based Routing to Support Events, Coordination and Topology-Aware Communication in Wide-Area Grid Environments
Craig A. Lee, B. Scott Michel · 2020
The potential scale of a ubiquitous, internet-scale event service for coordination is staggering. While producers and consumers of events may be well-known to each other in many cases, there are many other situations where they may want to produce and consume events based on some type or properties through a publish/subscribe interface. Hence, content-based routing is a fundamental capability that will be necessary to support coordination in wide-area environments. Content-based routing also provides support for interest management in distributed simulations, and novel uses such as scoped, topology-aware communication semantics among the members of a group, including collective operations, filtering, compression, encryption, quality of service, and transcoding. Several implementation approaches are possible. These 100 include (1) a traditional network of servers, (2) a middleware forwarding and routing layer in user-space, and (3) active networks. Content-based routing, however, which basically involves a form of associative matching, can be expensive to implement. While a good amount of work has been done in quantitatively evaluating a network of servers, the effectiveness of user-space middleware and active networks is just beginning to be investigated. Such work is clearly needed and motivated by the potential benefits of content-based routing in wide-area environments.