A distributed complex event processing system for scalable efficient event detection in intelligent environments

Jesús Rosa-Bilbao

doi:10.1007/s00607-026-01713-1

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A distributed complex event processing system for scalable efficient event detection in intelligent environments

2026-08-03

Jesús Rosa-Bilbao

Alejandro Guitarte-Fernández

Juan Boubeta-Puig *

DOI：10.1007/s00607-026-01713-1

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Abstract

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The increasing volume and heterogeneity of real-time data generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices in intelligent environments poses significant challenges for efficient data processing. Traditional centralized Complex Event Processing (CEP) deployments can become bottlenecks when geographically distributed sensors continuously generate heterogeneous events. To address this issue, this paper proposes an edge-fog-cloud Distributed Complex Event Processing (DCEP) system for scalable event detection in intelligent environments. The proposed system assigns raw event generation to the edge layer, local event abstraction to fog-layer CEP engines, and higher-level alert composition to a cloud-layer CEP engine. The implementation combines Apache Kafka, Esper, lightweight ARM devices, and a server, and is evaluated through functional tests, integration tests, a distributed stress test, and a controlled comparison between centralized and distributed DCEP deployments. The stress test shows that the distributed deployment reaches 68,027 processed events/s before saturation in the evaluated setup. The controlled comparison executes the same event patterns as a single-node DCEP deployment on an Orange Pi and as a distributed DCEP deployment across Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, and server nodes. Across all tested rates, both deployments produce the same number of high-level alerts, while the distributed deployment achieves lower end-to-end latency and higher high-level-alert output rate. These findings show that the proposed system is beneficial when event patterns can be decomposed by domain and placed across heterogeneous nodes.

Keywords:

Distributed complex event processing

Event detection

Edge-fog-cloud architecture

Internet of things

Decision-making