Soft state in publish/subscribe

Building survivable content-based publish/subscribe systems is difficult. Every node in a distributed publish/subscribe system stores a significant amount of routing state which can be easily corrupted due to message omissions, link and node failures. In this paper, we show how to build a soft state content-based publish/subscribe system where the whole state is stored at the edge of the publish/subscribe network, at the entity which is utilizing the state. This results in a robust and resilient system, as the routing state is permanently lost or corrupted only if the endpoint entity associated with the given state permanently fails.