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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

ZStream : a cost-based query processor for composite event detection

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Composite (or Complex) event processing (CEP) systems search sequences of incoming primitive events for occurrences of user-specified event patterns. Recently, they are gaining more and more attention in a variety of areas due to their powerful and expressive query language and performance potential. Sequentiality (temporal ordering) is the primary way in which CEP relates events to each other. Examples include tracing a car's movement in a predefined area (where a car moves through a series of places), detecting anomalies in stock prices (where the rise and fall of the price of some stocks is monitored), detecting intrusion in network monitoring (where a specific sequence of malicious activities is detected) or catching break points in debugging systems (where a sequence of function calls are made). But even searching for a simple sequence pattern involving only equality constraints between its components is an NP-complete problem. Furthermore, simple sequentiality is not enough to express many real world patterns, which also involve conjunction (e.g., concurrent events), disjunction (e.g., a choice between two options) and negation, making the matching problem even more complex. In this thesis, we present a CEP system called ZStream to efficiently process such sequential patterns. Besides simple sequentiality, ZStream is also able to support other relations such as conjunction, disjunction, negation and Kleene Closure. ZStream uses a tree-based plan for both the logical and physical representation of query patterns. Using this tree-based infrastructure, ZStream is able to unify the evaluation of sequence, conjunction, disjunction, negation, and Kleene Closure as variants of the join operator. A single pattern may have several equivalent physical tree plans, with different evaluation costs. Hence a cost model is proposed to estimate the computation cost of a plan.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2008

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Mei, Yuan, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Samuel Madden.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Language dc:language.iso
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44736
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/44736

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Mei, Yuan, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ZStream : a cost-based query processor for composite event detection. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44736