An on-the-fly provenance tracking mechanism for stream processing systems

Applications that operate over streaming data with high-volume and real-time processing requirements are becoming increasingly important. These applications process streaming data in real-time and deliver instantaneous responses to support precise and on-time decisions. In such systems, traceability - the ability to verify and investigate the source of a particular output - in real-time is extremely important. This ability allows raw streaming data to be checked and processing steps to be verified and validated in timely manner. Therefore, it is crucial that stream systems have a mechanism for dynamically tracking provenance - the process that produced result data - at execution time, which we refer to as on-the-fly stream provenance tracking. In this paper, we propose a novel on-the-fly provenance tracking mechanism that enables provenance queries to be performed dynamically without requiring provenance assertions to be stored persistently. We demonstrate how our provenance mechanism works by means of an on-the-fly provenance tracking algorithm. The experimental evaluation shows that our provenance solution does not have a significant effect on the normal processing of stream systems given a 7% overhead. Moreover, our provenance solution offers low-latency processing (0.3 ms per additional component) with reasonable memory consumption.