Topic Allocation Method on Edge Servers for Latency-sensitive Notification Service

Abstract: The importance of real-time notification has been growing for social services and Intelligent Transporting System (ITS). As an advanced version of Pub/Sub systems, publish-process-subscribe systems, where published messages are spooled and processed on edge servers, have been proposed to achieve data-driven intelligent notifications. In this paper, we present a system that allows a topic to be managed on multiple edge servers so that messages are processed near the publishers, even when publishers are spread over a wide area. Duplicating messages on geographically distributed servers could enable immediate notification to neighboring subscribers. However, the duplicated message spool may cause exhaustion of resources. We prepare a formal model of our publish-process-subscribe system and formulate the topic allocation as an optimization problem under the resource constraints of edge servers. As the optimization problem is NP-hard, we propose heuristics leveraging the locality and the pub/sub relationships observed between clients to use the edge server resources efficiently. Our performance evaluation shows that our method reduces the delay to deliver notifications and the effectiveness of the strategy exploiting the relationships between clients.