Towards Efficient Dissemination and Filtering of XML Data Streams

The vast amounts of data generated in near real-time due to prolific use of sensors, pervasive usage of mobile Internet, and popularity of social media platforms, necessitates the efficient dissemination of the semi-structured streaming data to the consuming applications. Towards this end, we introduce the subscriber-centric XML filtering approach for seamless and efficient XML stream replication/distribution mechanism. The subscriber-centric filtering architecture can be configured to support different topologies in order to support efficient message filtering for a large number of concurrent subscribers. It allows selective filtering on the various nodes that improves efficiency and provides applications with data on a need-to-know basis. Moreover, it supports inter-operability and allows semi-structured streams generated from multiple sources to be filtered. Our XML filtering network consists of decoupled data producers, message transformation agents and XML brokers that can be deployed in conventional data centers as well as in the public cloud environment. We provide detailed performance results of processing filtering queries in several use case scenarios with varying XML message loads and number of nodes involved in the replication/dissemination process. Our results indicate that the subscriber-centric XML filtering architecture is a viable approach for disseminating semi-structured data streams to the various consuming applications.