Data dissemination supporting collaborative complex event processing: Characteristics and open issues

Most distributed applications today receive events, process them and in turn create new events which are sent to other processes. Business intelligence, air traffic control, collaborative security, complex system software management are examples of such applications. In these applications basic events, potentially occurred at different sites, are correlated in order to detect complex event patterns formed by basic events that could have temporal and spatial relationships among them. In this context, a fundamental functionality is the data dissemination that brings events from event producers to event 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. We consider event traffic can reach thousands of events per second coming from different event sources; that is, the data dissemination service has to sustain high throughput. Finally, we present an assessment of a number of technologies that can be used to disseminate data in the earlier mentioned context, discussing scenarios where those technologies can be effectively deployed. © 2010 ACM.