Runtime Verification Containers for Publish/Subscribe Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores using lightweight containerized runtime verification tools to monitor publish/subscribe networks, demonstrating their effectiveness through benchmarks and a real-world case study in software-defined vehicles.

Contribution

It introduces a novel container-based approach for deploying runtime verification in pub/sub networks, addressing integration challenges in industrial settings.

Findings

Containerized runtime verification is lightweight and easily deployable.

The approach effectively monitors message flow in pub/sub networks.

Benchmark results show acceptable performance overhead.

Abstract

Publish/subscribe (pub/sub) networks are a cornerstone of modern distributed systems, playing a crucial role in applications like the Internet of Things (IoT) and robotics. While runtime verification techniques seem ideal for ensuring the correctness of such highly dynamic and large-scale networks, integrating runtime monitors seamlessly into real-world industrial use cases presents significant challenges. This paper studies modern containerization technology to deploy runtime verification tools to monitor publish/subscribe networks with a performance focus. Runtime verification containers are lightweight and deployable alongside other containerized publisher and subscriber participants. Each runtime verification container monitors message flow, enabling runtime verification of network behavior. We comprehensively benchmark the container-based approach using several experiments and a real-world case study from the software-defined vehicle domain.