Minimizing the Reconfiguration Overhead in Content-Based Publish-Subscribe

The publish-subscribe model provides strong decoupling among the components of a distributed application. This makes it amenable to highly dynamic environments. Nevertheless, publish-subscribe systems exploiting a distributed event dispatcher are typically not able to rearrange dynamically their operations to adapt to changes which impact the topology of the dispatching infrastructure. This paper presents a description and analysis of a novel algorithm to deal with this kind of reconfiguration. The strength of this algorithm is its ability to minimize the portion of the system affected by the reconfiguration by exploiting a novel concept we refer to as the reconfiguration path. Simulations compare our approach with two others and show a significant reduction (up to 76%) in the overhead caused by reconfiguration.