On reliability in publish/subscribe systems: a survey

摘要

In recent years, publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems have evolved as serious candidate for the implementation of group communication for distributed systems. However, they have not yet been properly evaluated with respect to the critical dimension of reliability. In particular, existing surveys do not consider the case of selfish behaviour of the nodes. This paper aims to bridge this gap by reviewing 25 pub/sub systems of the literature in order to evaluate their Byzantine, altruistic, rational tolerance capabilities, i.e. how well they are able to prevent or tolerate Byzantine failures as well as rational (selfish) behaviour. To this end, we also provide the foundations required for systematically evaluating such capabilities: we define a comprehensive classification scheme of pub/sub systems and a taxonomy of elementary failures. The latter covers not only failures that may be caused by arbitrary faults but also those arising from selfish behaviour of the nodes.