Delay-Cognizant Reliable Delivery for Publish/Subscribe Overlay Networks

The number of real-world applications that require QoS guarantees is constantly increasing and they often follow the publish/subscribe (pub/sub)messaging paradigm, which provides loosely coupled many-to-many communication. Many QoS-aware systems use overlay networks as they allow flexible routing. To provide QoS-aware pub/sub messaging in overlay networks, the messaging system should be adaptive to the changes in network conditions (such as delay and failures). However, many pub/sub systems depend on a flexed routing topology and it is costly to rebuild this topology in case of failures. This study seeks to address this challenge with Delay-Cognizant Reliable Delivery (DCRD), a novel and delay-aware dynamic routing algorithm to provide reliable message delivery for pub/sub overlay networks. For reliable message delivery, DCRD no longer uses a flxed routing topology. Instead, it dynamically switches among different links to bypass link failures and increase the chance to meet QoS requirement. Each node tries different neighboring nodes in an order that is mathematically proven to minimize the expected delay of packet delivery. With all possible neighboring nodes sorted this way, DCRD guarantees that packets are delivered as long as there exists a path between the publisher and subscriber and that the expected delay is minimized. DCRD is extensively evaluated in simulation with comparison to existing tree-based routing approaches as well as a multi path approach using different network topologies, delay constraints, and loss probabilities. Simulation results show that DCRD performs better than all the baselines, providing reliable message delivery and satisfying the delay requirement for more than 98% of messages when the link failure probability is 4% or less.