Adaptive response time control for metadata matching in information dissemination systems

Information dissemination is of increasing importance to our society. Existing work mainly focuses on delivering information from sources to sinks in a timely manner based on established subscriptions, with the assumption that those subscriptions are persistent. However, the bottleneck of many information dissemination systems is actually the matching process to continuously reevaluate such subscriptions between numerous sources and numerous sinks, in response to dynamically varying information attributes at runtime. In this paper, we propose an adaptive control architecture to meet the response time constraints on metadata matching in an example information dissemination system. Our adaptive controller features a rigorous design based on well-established control theory for guaranteed control accuracy and system stability. Furthermore, our controller can adapt to changes in the system model without reconfiguration and profiling. Empirical results on a physical testbed demonstrate that our controller has more accurate control and improved system quality of service than both an open-loop solution and a typical heuristic solution.