Method and system for matching consumers to events employing content-based multicast routing using approximate groups

Abstract

A facility is provided for distributing events to consumers in a content-based publish-subscribe system, wherein the consumers each have at least one subscription. The facility includes deriving a set of g approximate multicast groups from a larger set of G possible multicast groups in the publish-subscribe system. The deriving includes exploiting knowledge of subscription predicates of the consumers of the publish-subscribe system. The set of G possible multicast groups is collapsed to the smaller set of g approximate multicast groups, while minimizing the expected performance penalty in using the approximate multicast groups. The set of g approximate multicast groups is then used to forward events to consumers within the publish-subscribe system.