Semantic peer-to-peer overlays for publish/subscribe networks

Existing publish/subscribe systems suffer from several drawbacks, such as the reliance on a fixed infrastructure of reliable brokers, or the lack of expressiveness of their subscription language. Most importantly, the challenging task of routing messages based on their content remains a complex and time-consuming operation, and often provides results that are just barely better than a simple broadcast. In this paper, we present a novel approach to publish/subscribe that was designed to specifically address these issues. The producers and consumers are organized in a peer-to-peer network that self-adapts upon peer arrival, departure, or failure. Our publish/subscribe system features an extremely simple and efficient routing process and excellent scalability to large consumer populations, both in terms of routing and peer management overhead.