Data Dissemination Supporting Complex Event Pattern Detection

Abstract

The increasing use of the Internet and the improvement in hardware technology led most of the application previously deployed in "closed" environments, such as business intelligence, smart environments, complex system software management, to federate into geographically-distributed systems. Such applications use "sense-and-respond" capabilities, i.e., they correlate basic events that could potentially occur at different sources and detect complex event patterns, in order to timely and properly react to changes that may happen within the system. In this context, a fundamental role is played by the data dissemination service that brings events from producers to consumers where complex event patterns are detected. In this paper we discuss the characteristics that a data dissemination service should have in order to support in the best way the complex event pattern detection functionality, and present an assessment of a number of technologies that can be used to disseminate data in the earlier mentioned context. We also describe how those technologies can be effectively deployed in scenarios where numerous independent data sources produce large amounts of events in the form of high-throughput streams. Finally, we present a matching between distributed application requirements and the capabilities offered by the data dissemination services used to implement them, highlighting which aspects should be considered in the design of novel middleware solutions to fill this gap.