High Performance Publish/Subscribe Middleware in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of software-defined networking (SDN), ternary content-addressable memory of switches can be directly accessed by a publish/subscribe middleware to perform filtering operations at low latency. In this way, three important requirements for a publish/subscribe middleware can be fulfilled, namely, bandwidth efficiency, line-rate performance, and low latency in forwarding messages between producers and consumers. Nevertheless, it is challenging to sustain line-rate performance in the presence of dynamically changing interests of producers and consumers. In this paper, we realize a scalable, SDN-based publish/subscribe middleware, called PLEROMA, that performs efficient forwarding at line-rate. Moreover, PLEROMA offers methods to efficiently reconfigure a deployed topology in the presence of dynamic subscriptions and advertisements. We evaluate the performance of both the data plane and the control plane of PLEROMA to support our claim. Furthermore, we evaluate and benchmark the performances of SDN-compliant hardware and software switches in the context of our middleware.