Expressive Content-Based Routing in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

With the vision of Internet of Things gaining popularity at a global level, efficient publish/subscribe middleware for communication within and across data centers is extremely desirable. In this respect, the very popular Software-Defined Networking, which enables publish/subscribe middleware to perform line-rate filtering of events directly on hardware, can prove to be very useful. While deploying content filters directly on switches of a software-defined network allows optimized paths, high throughput rates, and low end-to-end latency, it suffers from certain inherent limitations with respect to number of bits available on hardware switches to represent these filters. Such a limitation affects expressiveness of filters, resulting in unnecessary traffic in the network.In this paper, we explore various complementary techniques to represent content filters expressively while being limited by hardware. We implement and evaluate techniques that i) use workload, in terms of events and subscriptions, to represent content, and ii) efficiently select attributes to reduce redundancy in content. Our detailed performance evaluations show the potential of these techniques in reducing unnecessary traffic when subjected to different workloads. Furthermore, the techniques proposed in this paper require significant updates to the network, i.e., the data plane, which must be performed in a consistent manner to ensure desired system behavior. As a result, in this paper, we, also, design and evaluate a light-weight approach that ensures data plane consistency in the presence of dynamic network updates.

State-Aware Load Shedding From Input Event Streams in Complex Event Processing

“…Various approximation techniques are frequently used to avoid resource constraints in various domains such as distributed graph processing [29], in-network processing [30], [31], stream processing [4], [23], [32], etc. Load shedding has, especially, been extensively studied in the stream processing domain [4], [7], [16], [23], [32], [33], [34], [35].…”

Flexible Content-based Publish/Subscribe over Programmable Data Planes

“…The approach supports at line-rate performance content-based publish/subscribe, but (1) limits the number of attribute value pairs because of the fixed size header fields, (2) approximates only encoded values and (3) creates additional overhead for the publishers to encode the content attributes [1].…”

Efficient Event Notification Middleware for Smart Microgrids Over P2P Networks

“…2. Flexible subscription system: Moving the subscription model from topic-based to content-based improve the system flexibility and accuracy [18], [27].…”

“…The multicast routing problem has been studied in some research works [11], [17], [27] looking for clusters of nodes configuration for multicast groups in order to reduce the network traffic. In these solutions, the routing system allows each node to create a routing table that associates the subscription of interest.…”

“…The matching system of these solutions works as follows: once the node receives the notification, it extracts the information, filters the content and subscribes if the content matches. However, refs [11] and [27] are topic-based and they are solutions that have not been specifically developed for energy environments. Therefore, the network performance and the optimization of computational resources have not been taken into account.…”