COPS: An Efficient Content Oriented Publish/Subscribe System

Abstract

Content-Centric Networks (CCN) provide substantial flexibility for users to obtain information without regard to the source of the information or its current location. Publish/ subscribe (pub/sub) systems have gained popularity in society to provide the convenience of removing the temporal dependency of the user having to indicate an interest each time he or she wants to receive a particular piece of related information. Currently, on the Internet, such pub/sub systems have been built on top of an IP-based network with the additional responsibility placed on the end-systems and servers to do the work of getting a piece of information to interested recipients. We propose ContentOriented Pub/Sub system (COPS) to achieve an efficient pub/sub capability for CCN. COPS enhances the heretofore inherently pull-based CCN architectures proposed by integrating push based multicast at the content-centric layer. We emulate an application that is particularly emblematic of a pub/sub environment—Twitter—but one where subscribers are interested in content (e.g., identified by keywords), rather than tweets from a particular individual. Using trace-driven simulation, we demonstrate that our architecture can achieve a scalable and efficient pub/sub content centric network. The simulator is parameterized using the results of careful microbenchmarking of the open source CCN implementation and of standard IP based forwarding. Our evaluations show that COPS provides considerable performance improvements in terms of aggregate network load, publisher load and subscriber experience compared to that of a traditional IP infrastructure.