Enabling Publish/Subscribe Middleware for Performance Critical Environments

Abstract

Information generating environments produce large volumes of data which serves the needs of millions of users around the world. These users prefer only the relevant information out of the data. However the process of extracting only the relevant information out of this data is a tedious job. So they delegate the responsibility of information extraction to systems which extract and transmit the relevant information to the interested users. Publish-subscribe systems (pub-sub) provide a basic architecture of such systems which receive data from information generating bodies and transmit the relevant information to the users according to their requirements (subscription) without any external invocation. Pub-sub help in reducing the efforts required at the users end to retrieve the relevant information. Their performance depends upon the mechanism acquired to: receive data from information sources, manage the requirements of users (subscription management), find out which incoming data satisfies users requirement (event-subscription matching) and then deliver (event dispatch) this information to the interested users. Different techniques are adopted to perform these tasks in the existing work; however they lack a technique which consumes less time to perform the above mentioned tasks and reduces the resource consumption at the systems end. This research provides an open architecture i.e. Enhanced Publish Subscribe Middleware (EPSM). EPSM proposes Hierarchal Grouping Methodology (HGM) to positively affect the performance of pub-sub making it suitable for time critical environments. HGM is based upon the fact that users within a particular domain bear similar data requirements i.e. subscriptions. This technique is called hierarchal as it establishes that apart from being similar, user 2 requirements are related through a parent child relationship. As some users pose subscriptions which are very complex requiring complex computations while others are generalized version of the complex subscriptions. HGM first groups together subscriptions on the basis of similarity and then relates them in the parent child relationship. Thus, EPSM provides an effective mechanism to improve the performance of a pub-sub in the areas of subscription management, the process of eventsubscription matching and event dispatch.