Exactly-once Delivery in a Content-based Publish-Subscribe System

This paper presents a general knowledge model for propagating information in a content-based publish-subscribe system. The model is used to derive an efficient and scalable protocol for exactly-once delivery to large numbers (tens of thousands per broker) of content-based subscribers in either publisher order or uniform total order. Our protocol allows intermediate content filtering at each hop, but requires persistent storage only at the publishing site. It is tolerant of message drops, message reorderings, node failures, and link failures, and maintains only “soft ” state at intermediate nodes. We evaluate the performance of our implementation both under failure-free conditions and with fault injection.