Fair Adaptive Overlay Communications

Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays have strongly influenced scalable communication infrastructures. In this paper we study design decisions in the context of publish/subscribe, a central communication paradigm for building distributed applications at scale. In particular, we highlight an important aspect of adaptively managing decentralized peer-to-peer systems called fairness. Fairness accounts for a fair contribution of peers dependent on the benefit of using a service. For this, we introduce f-fairness, a fairness metric accounting for unbalanced workloads in publish/subscribe systems. To support f-fairness, we propose and review adaptation mechanisms that support building membership and event distribution for publish/subscribe.