arXiv subjects

Kurt Rothermel

Publications and source records attributed to Kurt Rothermel.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Spatially-Aware Publish-Subscribe Middleware for IoT Applications

Spatial and proximity awareness are critical enablers for efficient communication in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the lack of suitable middleware support and standardized mechanisms for spatial awareness significantly limits the pervasiveness of location-dependent applications. In this paper, we present a novel approach that extends topic-based publish-subscribe, a dominant messaging model in this domain, with integrated spatial filtering and routing capabilities. Our approach leverages a highly flexible geometric method for describing spatial filters, enabling expressive and efficient spatial subscriptions. A geometric world model operates together with an enhanced topic-based broker to realize spatially constrained message dissemination. Importantly, this functionality is achieved using the MQTT5 protocol without violating the standard or requiring any modifications to existing client implementations. Experimental results based on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate strong system efficiency, minimal computational overhead at the broker, and the practical feasibility of deploying the approach on existing IoT devices.

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arXiv2025

Multicast-partitioning in Time-triggered Stream Planning for Time-Sensitive Networks

Multicast allows sending a message to multiple recipients without having to create and send a separate message for each recipient. This preserves network bandwidth, which is particularly important in time-sensitive networks. These networks are commonly used to provide latency-bounded communication for real-time systems in domains like automotive, avionics, industrial internet of things, automated shop floors, and smart energy grids. The preserved bandwidth can be used to admit additional real-time messages with specific quality of service requirements or to reduce the end-to-end latencies for messages of any type. However, using multicast communication can complicate traffic planning, as it requires free queues or available downstream egress ports on all branches of the multicast tree. In this work, we present a novel multicast partitioning technique to split multicast trees into smaller multicast or unicast trees. This allows for a more fine-grained trade-off between bandwidth utilization and traffic scheduling difficulty. Thus, schedulability in dynamic systems can be improved, in terms the number of admitted streams and the accumulated network throughput. We evaluated the multicast partitioning on different network topologies and with three different scheduling algorithms. With the partitioning, 5-15\% fewer streams were rejected, while achieving 5-125\% more network throughput, depending on the scheduling algorithm.

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arXiv2025

City Models: Past, Present and Future Prospects

We attempt to take a comprehensive look at the challenges of representing the spatio-temporal structures and dynamic processes defining a city's overall characteristics. For the task of urban planning and urban operation, we take the stance that even if the necessary representations of these structures and processes can be achieved, the most important representation of the relevant mindsets of the citizens are, unfortunately, mostly neglected. After a review of major "traditional" urban models of structures behind urban scale, form, and dynamics, we turn to major recent modeling approaches triggered by recent advances in AI that enable multi-modal generative models. Some of these models can create representations of geometries, networks and images, and reason flexibly at a human-compatible semantic level. They provide huge amounts of knowledge extracted from Terabytes of text and image documents and cover the required rich representation spectrum including geographic knowledge by different knowledge sources, degrees of granularity and scales. We then discuss what these new opportunities mean for the modeling challenges posed by cities, in particular with regard to the role and impact of citizens and their interactions within the city infrastructure. We propose to integrate these possibilities with existing approaches, such as agent-based models, which opens up new modeling spaces including rich citizen models which are able to also represent social interactions. Finally, we put forward some thoughts about a vision of a "social AI in a city ecosystem" that adds relevant citizen models to state-of-the-art structural and process models. This extended city representation will enable urban planners to establish citizen-oriented planning of city infrastructures for human culture, city resilience and sustainability.

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arXiv2024

Efficient Conflict Graph Creation for Time-Sensitive Networks with Dynamically Changing Communication Demands

Many applications of cyber-physical systems require real-time communication: manufacturing, automotive, etc. Recent Ethernet standards for Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) offer time-triggered scheduling in order to guarantee low latency and jitter bounds. This requires precise frame transmission planning, which becomes especially hard when dealing with many streams, large networks, and dynamically changing communications. A very promising approach uses conflict graphs, modeling conflicting transmission configurations. Since the creation of conflict graphs is the bottleneck in these approaches, we provide an improvement to the conflict graph creation. We present a randomized selection process that reduces the overall size of the graph in half and three heuristics to improve the scheduling success. In our evaluations we show substantial improvements in the graph creation speed and the scheduling success compared to existing work, updating existing schedules in fractions of a second. Additionally, offline planning of 9000 streams was performed successfully within minutes.

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arXiv2023

Grand Perspective: Load Shedding in Distributed CEP Applications

In distributed Complex Event Processing (CEP) applications with high load but limited resources, bottleneck operators in the operator graph can significantly slow down processing of event streams, thus compelling the need to shed load. A high-quality load shedding strategy that resolves the bottleneck with high output quality evaluates each event's importance with regards to the application's final output and drops less important events from the event stream for the benefit of important ones. So far, no solution has been proposed that is able to permit good load shedding in distributed, multi-operator CEP applications. On one hand, shedding strategies have been proposed for single-operator CEP applications that can measure an event's importance immediately at the bottleneck operator, only, and thereby ignore the effect of other streams in the application on an event's importance. On the other hand, shedding strategies have been proposed for applications with multiple operators from the area of stream processing that provide a fixed selectivity which is not given in the conditional CEP operators. We, therefore, propose a load-shedding solution for distributed CEP applications that maximizes the application's final output and ensures timely processing of important events by using a set of CEP-tailored selectivity functions and a linear program, which is an abstraction of the CEP application. Moreover, our solution ensures a quality optimal shedder configuration even in the presence of dynamically changing conditions. With the help of extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real data, we show that our solution successfully resolves overload at bottleneck operators and at the same time maximizes the quality of the application's output.

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arXiv2023

gSPICE: Model-Based Event Shedding in Complex Event Processing

Overload situations, in the presence of resource limitations, in complex event processing (CEP) systems are typically handled using load shedding to maintain a given latency bound. However, load shedding might negatively impact the quality of results (QoR). To minimize the shedding impact on QoR, CEP researchers propose shedding approaches that drop events/internal state with the lowest importances/utilities. In both black-box and white-box shedding approaches, different features are used to predict these utilities. In this work, we propose a novel black-box shedding approach that uses a new set of features to drop events from the input event stream to maintain a given latency bound. Our approach uses a probabilistic model to predict these event utilities. Moreover, our approach uses Zobrist hashing and well-known machine learning models, e.g., decision trees and random forests, to handle the predicted event utilities. Through extensive evaluations on several synthetic and two real-world datasets and a representative set of CEP queries, we show that, in the majority of cases, our load shedding approach outperforms state-of-the-art black-box load shedding approaches, w.r.t. QoR.

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arXiv2023

Utility-Aware Load Shedding for Real-time Video Analytics at the Edge

Real-time video analytics typically require video frames to be processed by a query to identify objects or activities of interest while adhering to an end-to-end frame processing latency constraint. Such applications impose a continuous and heavy load on backend compute and network infrastructure because of the need to stream and process all video frames. Video data has inherent redundancy and does not always contain an object of interest for a given query. We leverage this property of video streams to propose a lightweight Load Shedder that can be deployed on edge servers or on inexpensive edge devices co-located with cameras and drop uninteresting video frames. The proposed Load Shedder uses pixel-level color-based features to calculate a utility score for each ingress video frame, which represents the frame's utility toward the query at hand. The Load Shedder uses a minimum utility threshold to select interesting frames to send for query processing. Dropping unnecessary frames enables the video analytics query in the backend to meet the end-to-end latency constraint with fewer compute and network resources. To guarantee a bounded end-to-end latency at runtime, we introduce a control loop that monitors the backend load for the given query and dynamically adjusts the utility threshold. Performance evaluations show that the proposed Load Shedder selects a large portion of frames containing each object of interest while meeting the end-to-end frame processing latency constraint. Furthermore, the Load Shedder does not impose a significant latency overhead when running on edge devices with modest compute resources.

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arXiv2023

Availability Analysis of Redundant and Replicated Cloud Services with Bayesian Networks

Due to the growing complexity of modern data centers, failures are not uncommon any more. Therefore, fault tolerance mechanisms play a vital role in fulfilling the availability requirements. Multiple availability models have been proposed to assess compute systems, among which Bayesian network models have gained popularity in industry and research due to its powerful modeling formalism. In particular, this work focuses on assessing the availability of redundant and replicated cloud computing services with Bayesian networks. So far, research on availability has only focused on modeling either infrastructure or communication failures in Bayesian networks, but have not considered both simultaneously. This work addresses practical modeling challenges of assessing the availability of large-scale redundant and replicated services with Bayesian networks, including cascading and common-cause failures from the surrounding infrastructure and communication network. In order to ease the modeling task, this paper introduces a high-level modeling formalism to build such a Bayesian network automatically. Performance evaluations demonstrate the feasibility of the presented Bayesian network approach to assess the availability of large-scale redundant and replicated services. This model is not only applicable in the domain of cloud computing it can also be applied for general cases of local and geo-distributed systems.

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arXiv2023

Just a Second -- Scheduling Thousands of Time-Triggered Streams in Large-Scale Networks

Deterministic real-time communication with bounded delay is an essential requirement for many safety-critical cyber-physical systems, and has received much attention from major standardization bodies such as IEEE and IETF. In particular, Ethernet technology has been extended by time-triggered scheduling mechanisms in standards like TTEthernet and Time-Sensitive Networking. Although the scheduling mechanisms have become part of standards, the traffic planning algorithms to create time-triggered schedules are still an open and challenging research question due to the problem's high complexity. In particular, so-called plug-and-produce scenarios require the ability to extend schedules on the fly within seconds. The need for scalable scheduling and routing algorithms is further supported by large-scale distributed real-time systems like smart energy grids with tight communication requirements. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by proposing two novel algorithms called Hierarchical Heuristic Scheduling (H2S) and Cost-Efficient Lazy Forwarding Scheduling (CELF) to calculate time-triggered schedules for TTEthernet. H2S and CELF are highly efficient and scalable, calculating schedules for more than 45,000 streams on random networks with 1,000 bridges as well as a realistic energy grid network within sub-seconds to seconds.

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arXiv2022

Dynamic QoS-Aware Traffic Planning for Time-Triggered Flows in the Real-time Data Plane

Many networked applications, e.g., in the domain of cyber-physical systems, require strict service guarantees, usually in the form of jitter and latency bounds, for time-triggered traffic flows. It is a notoriously hard problem to compute a network-wide traffic plan that satisfies these requirements, and dynamic changes in the flow set add even more challenges. Existing traffic-planning methods are ill-suited for dynamic scenarios because they either suffer from high computational cost, can result in low network utilization, or provide no explicit guarantees when transitioning to a new traffic plan that incorporates new flows. Therefore, we present a novel approach for dynamic traffic planning of time-triggered flows. Our conflict-graph based modeling of the traffic planning problem allows to reconfigure active flows to increase the network utilization, while also providing per-flow QoS guarantees during the transition to the new traffic plan. Additionally, we introduce a novel heuristic for computing the new traffic plans. Evaluations of our prototypical implementation show that we can efficiently compute new traffic plans in scenarios with hundreds of active flows for a wide range of scenarios.

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arXiv2020

hSPICE: State-Aware Event Shedding in Complex Event Processing

In complex event processing (CEP), load shedding is performed to maintain a given latency bound during overload situations when there is a limitation on resources. However, shedding load implies degradation in the quality of results (QoR). Therefore, it is crucial to perform load shedding in a way that has the lowest impact on QoR. Researchers, in the CEP domain, propose to drop either events or partial matches (PMs) in overload cases. They assign utilities to events or PMs by considering either the importance of events or the importance of PMs but not both together. In this paper, we propose a load shedding approach for CEP systems that combines these approaches by assigning a utility to an event by considering both the event importance and the importance of PMs. We adopt a probabilistic model that uses the type and position of an event in a window and the state of a PM to assign a utility to an event corresponding to each PM. We, also, propose an approach to predict a utility threshold that is used to drop the required amount of events to maintain a given latency bound. By extensive evaluations on two real-world datasets and several representative queries, we show that, in the majority of cases, our load shedding approach outperforms state-of-the-art load shedding approaches, w.r.t. QoR.

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arXiv2020

DSCEP: An Infrastructure for Distributed Semantic Complex Event Processing

Today most applications continuously produce information under the form of streams, due to the advent of the means of collecting data. Sensors and social networks collect an immense variety and volume of data, from different real-life situations and at a considerable velocity. Increasingly, applications require processing of heterogeneous data streams from different sources together with large background knowledge. To use only the information on the data stream is not enough for many use cases. Semantic Complex Event Processing (CEP) systems have evolved from the classical rule-based CEP systems, by integrating high-level knowledge representation and RDF stream processing using both the data stream and background static knowledge. Additionally, CEP approaches lack the capability to semantically interpret and analyze data, which Semantic CEP (SCEP) attempts to address. SCEP has several limitations; one of them is related to their high processing time. This paper provides a conceptual model and an implementation of an infrastructure for distributed SCEP, where each SCEP operator can process part of the data and send it to other SCEP operators in order to achieves some answer. We show that by splitting the RDF stream processing and the background knowledge using the concept of SCEP operators, it's possible to considerably reduce processing time.

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arXiv2020

eSPICE: Probabilistic Load Shedding from Input Event Streams in Complex Event Processing

Complex event processing systems process the input event streams on-the-fly. Since input event rate could overshoot the system's capabilities and results in violating a defined latency bound, load shedding is used to drop a portion of the input event streams. The crucial question here is how many and which events to drop so the defined latency bound is maintained and the degradation in the quality of results is minimized. In stream processing domain, different load shedding strategies have been proposed but they mainly depend on the importance of individual tuples (events). However, as complex event processing systems perform pattern detection, the importance of events is also influenced by other events in the same pattern. In this paper, we propose a load shedding framework called eSPICE for complex event processing systems. eSPICE depends on building a probabilistic model that learns about the importance of events in a window. The position of an event in a window and its type are used as features to build the model. Further, we provide algorithms to decide when to start dropping events and how many events to drop. Moreover, we extensively evaluate the performance of eSPICE on two real-world datasets.

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arXiv2020

pSPICE: Partial Match Shedding for Complex Event Processing

Complex event processing (CEP) systems continuously process input event streams to detect patterns. Over time, the input event rate might fluctuate and overshoot the system's capabilities. One way to reduce the overload on the system is to use load shedding. In this paper, we propose a load shedding strategy for CEP systems which drops a portion of the CEP operator's internal state (a.k.a. partial matches) to maintain a given latency bound. The crucial question here is how many and which partial matches to drop so that a given latency bound is maintained while minimizing the degradation in the quality of results. In the stream processing domain, different load shedding strategies have been proposed that mainly depend on the importance of individual tuples. However, as CEP systems perform pattern detection, the importance of events is also influenced by other events in the stream. Our load shedding strategy uses Markov chain and Markov reward process to predict the utility/importance of partial matches to determine the ones to be dropped. In addition, we represent the utility in a way that minimizes the overhead of load shedding. Furthermore, we provide algorithms to decide when to start dropping partial matches and how many partial matches to drop. By extensively evaluating our approach on three real-world datasets and several representative queries, we show that the adverse impact of our load shedding strategy on the quality of results is considerably less than the impact of state-of-the-art load shedding strategies.

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arXiv2019

Using Surrogate Models and Data Assimilation for Efficient Mobile Simulations

Numerical simulations on mobile devices are an important tool for engineers and decision makers in the field. However, providing simulation results on mobile devices is challenging due to the complexity of the simulation, requiring remote server resources and distributed mobile computation. The additional large size of multi-dimensional simulation results leads to the insufficient performance of existing approaches, especially when the bandwidth of wireless communication is scarce. In this article, we present an optimized novel approach utilizing surrogate models and data assimilation techniques to reduce the communication overhead. Evaluations show that our approach is up to $6.5$ times faster than streaming results from the server while still meeting required quality constraints.

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arXiv2018

HYPE: Massive Hypergraph Partitioning with Neighborhood Expansion

Many important real-world applications-such as social networks or distributed data bases-can be modeled as hypergraphs. In such a model, vertices represent entities-such as users or data records-whereas hyperedges model a group membership of the vertices-such as the authorship in a specific topic or the membership of a data record in a specific replicated shard. To optimize such applications, we need an efficient and effective solution to the NP-hard balanced k-way hypergraph partitioning problem. However, existing hypergraph partitioners that scale to very large graphs do not effectively exploit the hypergraph structure when performing the partitioning decisions. We propose HYPE, a hypergraph partitionier that exploits the neighborhood relations between vertices in the hypergraph using an efficient implementation of neighborhood expansion. HYPE improves partitioning quality by up to 95% and reduces runtime by up to 39% compared to streaming partitioning.

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arXiv2018

P4CEP: Towards In-Network Complex Event Processing

In-network computing using programmable networking hardware is a strong trend in networking that promises to reduce latency and consumption of server resources through offloading to network elements (programmable switches and smart NICs). In particular, the data plane programming language P4 together with powerful P4 networking hardware has spawned projects offloading services into the network, e.g., consensus services or caching services. In this paper, we present a novel case for in-network computing, namely, Complex Event Processing (CEP). CEP processes streams of basic events, e.g., stemming from networked sensors, into meaningful complex events. Traditionally, CEP processing has been performed on servers or overlay networks. However, we argue in this paper that CEP is a good candidate for in-network computing along the communication path avoiding detouring streams to distant servers to minimize communication latency while also exploiting processing capabilities of novel networking hardware. We show that it is feasible to express CEP operations in P4 and also present a tool to compile CEP operations, formulated in our P4CEP rule specification language, to P4 code. Moreover, we identify challenges and problems that we have encountered to show future research directions for implementing full-fledged in-network CEP systems.

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arXiv2018

ADWISE: Adaptive Window-based Streaming Edge Partitioning for High-Speed Graph Processing

In recent years, the graph partitioning problem gained importance as a mandatory preprocessing step for distributed graph processing on very large graphs. Existing graph partitioning algorithms minimize partitioning latency by assigning individual graph edges to partitions in a streaming manner --- at the cost of reduced partitioning quality. However, we argue that the mere minimization of partitioning latency is not the optimal design choice in terms of minimizing total graph analysis latency, i.e., the sum of partitioning and processing latency. Instead, for complex and long-running graph processing algorithms that run on very large graphs, it is beneficial to invest more time into graph partitioning to reach a higher partitioning quality --- which drastically reduces graph processing latency. In this paper, we propose ADWISE, a novel window-based streaming partitioning algorithm that increases the partitioning quality by always choosing the best edge from a set of edges for assignment to a partition. In doing so, ADWISE controls the partitioning latency by adapting the window size dynamically at run-time. Our evaluations show that ADWISE can reach the sweet spot between graph partitioning latency and graph processing latency, reducing the total latency of partitioning plus processing by up to 23-47 percent compared to the state-of-the-art.

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