DCEP-Sim: An Open Simulation Framework for Distributed CEP: Introduction for Users and Prospective Developers

Evaluation of Distributed Complex Event Processing (CEP) systems is a rather challenging task. To simplify this task, we developed the open simulation framework for Distributed CEP, called DCEP-Sim. The goal of this tutorial is to facilitate the process of using DCEP-Sim. Since DCEP-Sim is designed and implemented in the popular network simulator ns-3 we introduce the most important concepts of ns-3. Simulations in ns-3 are configured and executed though a main program called an ns-3 script. We use a simple example script to explain how simulations with DCEP-Sim are set up and executed. To give an idea how DCEP-Sim can be adjusted to particular needs, we explain how DCEP-Sim can be adapted (e.g., through changing the workload and the network topology) and how new Distributed CEP solutions can be added by explaining how to add a new operator to DCEP-Sim.