Distributed data stream processing and edge computing: A survey on resource elasticity and future directions

In order to interpret, enrich, and analyze the streaming data, stream applications often access the data stored in an external database. Although there has been a lot of studies on stream processing, little attention has been paid so far to the join between streaming data and stored data. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive solution called DS-join for distributed processing of the join under the micro-batch model of recently distributed stream processing engines (SPEs), such as spark streaming. The micro-batch model performs stream processing as a series of very small batch jobs and is more fault-tolerant in a distributed environment compared with the record-at-a-time model. The DS-join reduces the number of database accesses by using micro-batching. Furthermore, the DS-join optimizes the join operation by minimizing the data shuffling, managing a cache in a distributed SPE, parallelizing the join processing, and balancing the load between the SPE and the external database system. The experimental results using real and synthetic datasets show that, compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the DS-join significantly improves throughput, especially for large databases.

In recent years, the application and wide adoption of Internet of Things (IoT)-based technologies have increased the proliferation of monitoring systems, which has consequently exponentially increased the amounts of heterogeneous data generated. Processing and analysing the massive amount of data produced is cumbersome and gradually moving from classical ‘batch’ processing—extract, transform, load (ETL) technique to real-time processing. For instance, in environmental monitoring and management domain, time-series data and historical dataset are crucial for prediction models. However, the environmental monitoring domain still utilises legacy systems, which complicates the real-time analysis of the essential data, integration with big data platforms and reliance on batch processing. Herein, as a solution, a distributed stream processing middleware framework for real-time analysis of heterogeneous environmental monitoring and management data is presented and tested on a cluster using open source technologies in a big data environment. The system ingests datasets from legacy systems and sensor data from heterogeneous automated weather systems irrespective of the data types to Apache Kafka topics using Kafka Connect APIs for processing by the Kafka streaming processing engine. The stream processing engine executes the predictive numerical models and algorithms represented in event processing (EP) languages for real-time analysis of the data streams. To prove the feasibility of the proposed framework, we implemented the system using a case study scenario of drought prediction and forecasting based on the Effective Drought Index (EDI) model. Firstly, we transform the predictive model into a form that could be executed by the streaming engine for real-time computing. Secondly, the model is applied to the ingested data streams and datasets to predict drought through persistent querying of the infinite streams to detect anomalies. As a conclusion of this study, a performance evaluation of the distributed stream processing middleware infrastructure is calculated to determine the real-time effectiveness of the framework.

The proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices is rapidly increasing the demands for efficient processing of low latency stream data generated close to the edge of the network. A large number of IoT applications require continuous processing of data streams in real-time. Examples include virtual reality applications, connected autonomous vehicles and smart city applications. Although current distributed stream processing systems offer various forms of fault tolerance, existing schemes do not understand the dynamic characteristics of edge computing infrastructures and the unique requirements of edge computing applications. Optimizing fault tolerance techniques to meet latency requirements while minimizing resource usage becomes a critical dimension of resource allocation and scheduling when dealing with latency-sensitive IoT applications in edge computing. In this paper, we present a novel resilient stream processing framework that achieves system-wide fault tolerance while meeting the latency requirements for edge-based applications. The proposed approach employs a novel resilient physical plan generation for stream queries and optimizes the placement of operators to minimize the processing latency during recovery and reduces the overhead of checkpointing. We implement a prototype of the proposed techniques in Apache Storm and evaluate it in a real testbed. Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach is highly effective and scalable while ensuring low latency and low-cost recovery for edge-based stream processing applications.

Internet of Things (IoT) systems include many smart devices that continuously generate massive spatio-temporal data, which can be difficult to process. These continuous data streams need to be stored smartly so that query searches are efficient. In this work, we propose an efficient method, in the fog-cloud computing architecture, to index continuous and heterogeneous data streams in metric space. This method divides the fog layer into three levels: clustering, clusters processing and indexing. The Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) algorithm is used to group the data from each stream into homogeneous clusters at the clustering fog level. Each cluster in the first data stream is stored in the clusters processing fog level and indexed directly in the indexing fog level in a Binary tree with Hyperplane (BH tree). The indexing of clusters in the subsequent data stream is determined by the coefficient of variation (CV) value of the union of the new cluster with the existing clusters in the cluster processing fog layer. An analysis and comparison of our experimental results with other results in the literature demonstrated the effectiveness of the CV method in reducing energy consumption during BH tree construction, as well as reducing the search time and energy consumption during a k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) parallel query search.

Ever-increasing amounts of data and requirements to process them in real time lead to more and more analytics platforms and software systems being designed according to the concept of stream processing. A common area of application is the processing of continuous data streams from sensors, for example, IoT devices or performance monitoring tools. In addition to analyzing pure sensor data, analyses of data for groups of sensors often need to be performed as well. Therefore, data streams of the individual sensors have to be continuously aggregated to a data stream for a group. Motivated by a real-world application scenario, we propose that such a stream aggregation approach has to allow for aggregating sensors in hierarchical groups, support multiple such hierarchies in parallel, provide reconfiguration at runtime, and preserve the scalability and reliability qualities induced by applying stream processing techniques. We propose a stream processing architecture fulfilling these requirements, which can be integrated into existing big data architectures. We present a pilot implementation of such an extended architecture and show how it is used in industry. Furthermore, in experimental evaluations we show that our solution scales linearly with the amount of sensors and provides adequate reliability in the case of faults.

The rapid growth of data streams, propelled by the proliferation of sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, presents significant challenges for real-time clustering of high-dimensional data. Traditional clustering algorithms struggle with high dimensionality, memory and time constraints, and adapting to dynamically evolving data. Existing dimensionality reduction methods often neglect feature ranking, leading to suboptimal clustering performance. To address these issues, we introduce E-Stream, a novel entropy-based clustering algorithm for high-dimensional data streams. E-Stream performs real-time feature ranking based on entropy within a sliding time window to identify the most informative features, which are then utilized with the DenStream algorithm for efficient clustering. We evaluated E-Stream using the NSL-KDD dataset, comparing it against DenStream, CluStream, and MR-Stream. The evaluation metrics included the average F-Measure, Jaccard Index, Fowlkes-Mallows Index, Purity, and Rand Index. The results show that E-Stream outperformed the baseline algorithms in both clustering accuracy and computational efficiency while effectively reducing dimensionality. E-Stream also demonstrated significantly less memory consumption and fewer computational requirements, highlighting its suitability for real-time processing of high-dimensional data streams. Despite its strengths, E-Stream requires manual parameter adjustment and assumes a consistent number of active features, which may limit its adaptability to diverse datasets. Future work will focus on developing a fully autonomous, parameter-free version of the algorithm, incorporating mechanisms to handle missing features and improving the management of evolving clusters to enhance robustness and adaptability in dynamic IoT environments.

Immersive, interactive applications grouped under the concept of Immersipresence require on-line processing and mixing of multimedia data streams and structures. One critical issue seldom addressed is the integration of different solutions to technical challenges, developed independently in separate fields, into working systems, that operate under hard performance constraints. In order to realize the Immersipresence vision, a consistent, generic approach to system integration is needed, that is adapted to the constraints of research development. This paper introduces SAI, a new software architecture model for designing, analyzing and implementing applications performing distributed, asynchronous parallel processing of generic data streams. SAI provides a universal framework for the distributed implementation of algorithms and their easy integration into complex systems that exhibit desirable software engineering qualities such as efficiency, scalability, extensibility, reusability and interoperability. The SAI architectural style and its properties are described. The use of SAI and of its supporting open source middleware (MFSM) is illustrated with integrated, distributed interactive systems.

One fundamental challenge in data stream processing is to cope with the ubiquity of disorder of tuples within a stream caused by network latency, operator parallelization, merging of asynchronous streams, etc. High result accuracy and low result latency are two conflicting goals in out-of-order stream processing. Different applications may prefer different extent of trade-offs between the two goals. However, existing disorder handling solutions either try to meet one goal to the extreme by sacrificing the other, or try to meet both goals but have shortcomings including unguaranteed result accuracy or increased complexity in operator implementation and application logic. To meet different application requirements on the latency versus result accuracy trade-off in out-of-order stream processing, in this paper, we propose to make this trade-off user-configurable. Particularly, focusing on sliding window aggregates, we introduce AQ-K-slack, a buffer-based quality-driven disorder handling approach. AQ-K-slack leverages techniques from the fields of sampling-based approximate query processing and control theory. It can adjust the input buffer size dynamically to minimize the result latency, while respecting user-specified threshold on relative errors in produced query results. AQ-K-slack requires no a priori knowledge of disorder characteristics of data streams, and imposes no changes to the query operator implementation or the application logic. Experiments over real-world out-of-order data streams show that, compared to the state-of-art, AQ-K-slack can reduce the average buffer size, thus the average result latency, by at least 51% while respecting user-specified requirement on the accuracy of query results.

A Novel Edge Computing Architecture Based on Adaptive Stratified Sampling

The early Internet of Things stream processing platforms were mainly designed to collect and display real‐time raw sensor measurements. Data often has to go through several phases of processing to lead to actionable automatic or human decision making. This chapter discusses five main operations performed on streaming data: compression, dimensionality reduction, summarization, learning, and visualization. It distinguishes two main types of stream data processing systems. The first type, also called a data stream management system, is based on relational database principles and introduced the concept of continuous queries. The second type does not enforce a relational view and enables the creation of custom operators. Based on batch and stream processing paradigms, two data processing architectures emerged: the Lambda architecture, which enables both batch and stream processing, and the simpler Kappa architecture, which enables stream processing.

IFogLearn++: A new platform for fog layer's IoT attack detection in critical infrastructure using machine learning and big data processing

Leveraging Deep Learning and IoT big data analytics to support the smart cities development: Review and future directions

Data streams are increasingly needed for different types of applications and domains, where dynamicity and data velocity are of foremost importance. In this context, research challenges raise regarding the generation, publication, processing, and discovery of these streams, especially in distributed, heterogeneous and collaborative environments such as the Web. Stream reasoning has addressed some of these challenges in the last decade, presenting a novel data processing paradigm that lays at the intersection among semantic data modeling, stream processing, and inference techniques. However, stream reasoning works have focused almost exclusively on architectures and approaches that assume an isolated processing environment. Therefore, they lack, in general, the means for discovering, collaborating, negotiating, sharing, or validating data streams on a highly heterogeneous ecosystem as the Web. Agents and multi-agent systems research has long developed principles and foundations for enabling some of these features, although usually under assumptions that require to be revised in order to comply with the characteristics of data streams. This paper presents a vision for a Web of stream reasoning agents, capable of sharing not only streaming data, but also processing duties, using collaboration and negotiation protocols, while relying on common vocabularies and protocols that take into account the high dynamicity of their knowledge, goals, and behavioral patterns.

This paper presents an integrated approach to real-time processing and analysis of large-scale data streams using artificial intelligence methods, multi-agent systems, and multi-layered control architectures. Particular attention is devoted to combining technologies that are traditionally applied separately: unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control systems, situational centers, streaming video services, and distributed sensor networks. The proposed model accounts for the stochastic nature of the environment, the dynamic behaviour of data flows, and resource constraints, which are critical factors for real-time systems. The study develops a multi-level multi-agent architecture that includes central, regional, and edge nodes, as well as local agents such as drones, sensors, and client-side video devices. A mathematical formalization of agent interaction and reward functions is proposed to ensure a balance between service quality, latency, packet loss, and energy consumption. The use of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms is introduced to support adaptive decision-making in real time, along with the development of a digital twin of the environment for predicting future system states using deep and generative models. The results demonstrate that the integration of edge computing, hierarchical decision-making, and local agent autonomy significantly enhances system resilience, provides stable performance under external disturbances, and enables effective infrastructure scaling. The findings form a scientific foundation for designing adaptive, robust, and self-learning next-generation digital ecosystems capable of intelligent processing of large data streams in real time

The processing of data streams in general and the mining of such streams in particular have recently attracted considerable attention in various research fields. A key problem in stream mining is to extend existing machine learning and data mining methods so as to meet the increased requirements imposed by the data stream scenario, including the ability to analyze incoming data in an online, incremental manner, to observe tight time and memory constraints, and to appropriately respond to changes of the data characteristics and underlying distributions, amongst others. This paper considers the problem of classification on data streams and develops an instance-based learning algorithm for that purpose. The experimental studies presented in the paper suggest that this algorithm has a number of desirable properties that are not, at least not as a whole, shared by currently existing alternatives. Notably, our method is very flexible and thus able to adapt to an evolving environment quickly, a point of utmost importance in the data stream context. At the same time, the algorithm is relatively robust and thus applicable to streams with different characteristics.