A Content-Oriented Architecture for Publish/Subscribe Systems

With the user behavior of Internet shifting towards data dissemination and retrieval, Information Centric Networking (ICN) is proposed to suit these demands. ICN treats content as the first-class entity, with nodes exchanging information based on the names of the content instead of the IP addresses of the end points requesting or providing the content. This shift from a “location-based” network to a “content-centric” network allows more efficient data dissemination, especially when the content may be available at multiple points, or the provider or consumer is mobile. Publish/Subscribe (pub/sub) is another important content-centric communication model where publishers and subscribers only focus on the data rather than the location of each other. However, most of the ICN proposals do not have direct support for pub/sub. This inevitably results in pub/sub being implemented via polling which leads to higher network load, higher publisher load and longer latency. This dissertation tackles the shortcomings of existing solutions and provides a full-fledge solution for efficient pub/sub communication in ICN. By enhancing Named Data Networking (NDN) in the network layer, Content Oriented Network for Publish/Subscribe Systems (COPSS) is able to support best-effort push-based multicast that is required by pub/sub. A transport-layer protocol (Control Protocol for Scalable and Adaptive Information Dissemination (SAID)) is proposed to satisfy the need for reliability and congestion control during pub/sub. The protocol attempts to solve a long-standing issue of multicast congestion control by separating congestion control from reliability. In the application layer, an object resolution system (Object Resolution Framework in Information-Centric Environment (ORICE)) similar to a search engine is proposed to help users get identities of the data that they might need. The efficiency of the architecture is evaluated via applications that emulate Twitter, gaming, VoD and file transfer. Results show that the architecture can outperform existing pullbased ICN solutions in terms of response latency, network load and publisher load. Additionally, this dissertation extends the concept of content-concentricity to a common and important network management issue – service chaining. The design proves that this concept can be incorporated into many network designs and has the potential to make these systems more efficient and dynamic.