Scalable Pattern Sharing on Event Streams

Medhabi Ray, Chuan Lei, Elke A. Rundensteiner

Abstract: Complex Event Processing (CEP) has emerged as a technology of choice for high performance event analytics in time-critical decision-making applications. Yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to support high-performance event processing due to the rising number and complexity of event pattern queries and the increasingly high velocity of event streams. In this work we design the SPASS framework that successfully tackles these demanding CEP workloads. Our SPASS optimizer identifies opportunities for effective shared processing among CEP queries by leveraging time-based event correlations among queries. The problem of pattern sharing is shown to be NP-hard by reducing the Minimum Substring Cover problem to our CEP pattern sharing problem. The SPASS optimizer is designed that finds a shared pattern plan in polynomial-time covering all sequence patterns while still guaranteeing an optimality bound. To execute this shared pattern plan, the SPASS runtime employs stream transactions that assure concurrent shared maintenance and re-use of sub-patterns across queries. Our experimental study confirms that the SPASS framework achieves over 16 fold performance improvement for a wide range of experiments compared to the state-of-the-art solution.