Epidemic algorithms for reliable content-based publish-subscribe: an evaluation

Distributed content-based publish-subscribe middleware is emerging as a promising answer to the demands of modern distributed computing. Nevertheless, currently available systems usually do not provide reliability guarantees. This hampers their use in dynamic and unreliable scenarios, notably including mobile ones. We evaluate the effectiveness of an approach based on epidemic algorithms. Three algorithms we originally proposed in [P. Costa et al., (2003)] are thoroughly compared and evaluated through simulation in challenging unreliable settings. The results show that our use of epidemic algorithms improves significantly event delivery, is scalable, and introduces only limited overhead.