Modeling a publish/subscribe system as a multi-commodity transportation problem

The publish/subscribe paradigm enables creation of loosely coupled dynamic systems with asynchronous communication models but at the cost of unpredictable system behavior. Hence quality of service guarantees (QoS) are to be provided to bring in predictability in system behavior. There is a cost associated with providing the QoS guarantees and this cost needs to be reduced. In a publish/subscribe system, published information has to be delivered to a set of subscribers who have expressed interest in the publications. Optimal routing of information from producers of information to the consumers of information is critical to the performance of the publish/subscribe system. This paper proposes a strategy for routing of publications in a publish/subscribe system by modeling it as a multi commodity transportation problem. The proposed approach minimizes the cost of routing publications and also maintains the QoS guarantees.