Pub/Sub systems are gaining popularity due to their use in a variety of novel attractive applications, such as privacy-preserving decentralized social networks. In pub/sub systems, subscribers express their interests by subscribing and later get notifications when the publishers publish events matching their subscriptions. In topic-based pub/sub, subscriptions are expressed as discrete topics while publication events are associated with these topics. Topic-based pub/sub systems are deemed instrumental for delivering notifications in a decentralized social networks scenario, which motivates the need to investigate P2P pub/sub solutions.
A number of P2P topic-based pub/sub systems have been proposed in the past decade. However, several challenges remain to be solved. To this end we recently proposed a P2P topic-based pub/sub system coined PolderCast [1], which builds and maintains a pub/sub overlay used for efficient dissemination of publication events. In the PolderCast paper we presented a preliminary mini-survey of state-of-the-art topic-based pub/sub systems, which clearly illustrated different characteristics of these systems and their shortcomings. However, there is a need for even deeper analytical or empirical evaluation and comparison of these systems. Such study and comparison would be a great contribution to the research community.
The goal of this master thesis is to perform an evaluation of several topic-based Pub/Sub systems mentioned in Section 3 of the PolderCast paper [1]. For some of the systems, there already exists an available implementation. For the other systems, there is a need to implement them in Java using a P2P simulator such as PeerSim [2] (the choice of programming language can be discussed). Ideally, we should be able to deploy the implementations on a real network including the widely used PlanetLab [3] testbed. The evaluation of these systems should be conducted w.r.t several metrics using workloads from Facebook and Twitter. The thesis will provide hands-on experience with state-of-the-art pub/sub and P2P protocols and technologies. Thanks to the PlanetLab deployment, the student will also gain experience in designing and developing large-scale deployment of protocols over the wide Internet. Such an experience is likely to give an edge in future IT career, whether in academia or industry.
References:
[1] Vinay Setty, Maarten van Steen, Roman Vitenberg, and Spyros Voulgaris, "PolderCast: Fast, Robus, and Scalable Architecture for P2P Topic-based Pub/Sub", Middleware 2012 [pdf]
[2] A. Montresor and M. Jelasity. “PeerSim: A scalable P2P simulator.” In P2P Computing, 2009. [url]
[3] PlanetLab: https://www.planet-lab.org/