A decentralized control mechanism for stream processing networks

Data streaming applications are becoming more and more common due to the rapid development in emerging areas such as sensor networks, multimedia streaming, and on-line data mining, etc. These applications are often running in a decentralized, distributed environment. The requirements for processing large volumes of streaming data at real time have posed many great design challenges. One of the critical issues is to optimize the ongoing resource consumption of multiple, distributed, cooperating processing units. In this paper, we consider a generic model for the general stream data processing systems. We address the resource allocation problem for a collection of processing units so as to maximize the weighted sum of the throughput of different streams. Each processing unit may require multiple input data streams simultaneously and produce one or many valuable output streams. We develop decentralized control mechanisms that maximize the overall system throughput in such data stream processing networks. Performance analysis on the optimality and complexity of these mechanisms are also provided. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.