The Duality between Message Routing and Epidemic Data Replication

Several domains of networking such as Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have the common goal of transporting messages to their intended destinations. These networking domains share many requirements and employ routing protocols that are often composed of similar mechanisms. In this paper, we explore the synergy between message routing and data replication and propose the use of topology-independent weakly consistent partial replication systems as a messaging substrate for the above networking domains. These replication systems provide the key properties of eventual consistency, disruption tolerance, and at-most-once delivery, which translate into guaranteed delivery, failure resilience, and bandwidth efficiency—three much desired and repeatedly implemented aspects of message routing. We outline an implementation of a messaging system on top of a replication platform with content-based filtering and show that our design is general enough to implement many different routing policies employed in DTNs, MANETs, and P2P networks.