Congestion Avoidance with Incremental Filter Aggregation in Content-Based Routing Networks

The subscription covering optimization, whereby a general subscription quenches the forwarding of more specific ones, is a common technique to reduce network traffic and routing state in content-based routing networks. Such optimizations, however, leave the system vulnerable to unsubscriptions that trigger the immediate forwarding of all the subscriptions they had previously quenched. These subscription bursts can severely congest the network, and destabilize the system. This paper presents techniques to retain much of the benefits of subscription covering while avoiding bursty subscription traffic. Heuristics are used to estimate the similarity among subscriptions, and a distributed algorithm determines the portions of a subscription propagation tree that should be preserved. Evaluations show that these mechanisms avoid subscription bursts while maintaining relatively compact routing tables.