Hermes: A Distributed Event-Based Middleware Architecture

This paper argues that there is a need for an event-based middleware to build large-scale distributed systems. Existing publish/subscribe systems still have limitations compared to invocation-based middlewares. They introduce Hermes, a novel event-based distributed middleware architecture that follows a type- and attribute-based publish/subscribe model. It centres around the notion of an event type and supports features commonly known from object-oriented languages like type hierarchies and super-type subscriptions. A scalable routing algorithm using an overlay routing network is presented that avoids global broadcasts by creating rendezvous nodes. Fault-tolerance mechanisms that can cope with different kinds of failures in the middleware are integrated with the routing algorithm resulting in a scalable and robust system.