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Partition-based total order in content-based publish/subscribe systems

Author: Marc König

Supervisors: Prof. Boris Koldehofe, M.Sc. Ahamd Baghdadi

Format: Master's thesis, TU Ilmenau

The decoupled nature and scalability of modern publish/subscribe systems has increased interest in these communication paradigms. Especially content-based event notification systems have gained traction in recent years, as their expressiveness allows for more fine-grained applications. As prior research has been focusing on throughput and scalability first, secondary properties such as total order have been less developed. These properties are, however, necessary for certain high consistency use cases. This thesis presents a novel non-intrusive approach to establish total order in arbitrary content-based publish/subscribe systems. Our approach can be added to any broker implementation as it does not rely on additional constraints such as FIFO channels or centralized nodes. The only requirement inherent to this solution is a partitioning of the event space, which is very common for most modern systems. Using this solution, total-order can be established at a reasonable cost to network load and end-to-end latency.

Completed: 10.5.2026

References: https://bibliographie.tu-ilmenau.de/servlets/DozBibEntryServlet?id=ilm_mods_00080562