A Microservices Architecture for Distributed Complex Event Processing in Smart Cities

TL;DR

This paper proposes a distributed, microservices-based architecture for complex event processing in smart cities, aiming to improve system resilience and scalability by avoiding central orchestration bottlenecks.

Contribution

It introduces a choreography-based microservices architecture for distributed CEP, enhancing resilience and scalability compared to traditional orchestrated systems.

Findings

Improved system resilience against core failures

Enhanced horizontal scalability of event processing

Reduced bottlenecks in distributed CEP systems

Abstract

A considerable volume of data is collected from sensors today and needs to be processed in real time. Complex Event Processing (CEP) is one of the most important techniques developed for this purpose. In CEP, each new sensor measurement is considered an event and new event types can be defined based on other events occurrence. There exists several open-source CEP implementations currently available, but all of them use orchestration to distribute event processing. This kind of architectural organization may harm system resilience, since it relies on a central core (i.e. the orchestrator). Any failures in the core might impact the whole system. Moreover, the core can become a bottleneck on system performance. In this work, a choreography-based microservices architecture is proposed for distributed CEP, in order to benefit from the low coupling and greater horizontal scalability this kind of architecture provides.