Plan-based complex event detection across distributed sources

This paper presents an optimal but exponential-time dynamic programming algorithm and two polynomial-time heuristic algorithms, as well as their extensions for detecting multiple complex events with common sub-expressions, and describes the behavior and performance of the solutions.

Abstract

Complex Event Detection (CED) is emerging as a key capability for many monitoring applications such as intrusion detection, sensor-based activity & phenomena tracking, and network monitoring. Existing CED solutions commonly assume centralized availability and processing of all relevant events, and thus incur significant overhead in distributed settings. In this paper, we present and evaluate communication efficient techniques that can efficiently perform CED across distributed event sources. Our techniques are plan-based: we generate multi-step event acquisition and processing plans that leverage temporal relationships among events and event occurrence statistics to minimize event transmission costs, while meeting application-specific latency expectations. We present an optimal but exponential-time dynamic programming algorithm and two polynomial-time heuristic algorithms, as well as their extensions for detecting multiple complex events with common sub-expressions. We characterize the behavior and performance of our solutions via extensive experimentation on synthetic and real-world data sets using our prototype implementation.