Composite subscriptions in content-based publish/subscribe systems

Distributed publish/subscribe systems are naturally suited for processing events in distributed systems. However, support for expressing patterns about distributed events and algorithms for detecting correlations among these events are still largely unexplored. Inspired from the requirements of decentralized, event-driven workflow processing, we design a subscription language for expressing correlations among distributed events. We illustrate the potential of our approach with a workflow management case study. The language is validated and implemented in PADRES. In this paper we present an overview of PADRES, highlighting some of its novel features, including the composite subscription language, the coordination patterns, the composite event detection algorithms, the rule-based router design, and a detailed case study illustrating the decentralized processing of workflows. Our experimental evaluation shows that rule-based brokers are a viable and powerful alternative to existing, special-purpose, content-based routing algorithms. The experiments also show that the use of composite subscriptions in PADRES significantly reduces the load on the network. Complex workflows can be processed in a decentralized fashion with a gain of 40% in message dissemination cost. All processing is realized entirely in the publish/subscribe paradigm.