Combining Flexibility and Scalability in a Peer-to-Peer Publish/Subscribe System

The content-based publish/subscribe model has been adopted by many services to deliver data between distributed users based on application-specific semantics. Two key issues in such systems, the semantic expressiveness of content matching and the scalability of the matching mechanism, are often found to be in conflict due to the complexity associated with content matching. In this paper, we present a novel content-based publish/subscribe architecture based on peer-to-peer matching trees. The system achieves scalability by partitioning the responsibility of event matching to self-organized peers while allowing customizable matching functionalities. Experimental results using a variety of real world datasets demonstrate the scalability and flexibility of the system.