FIDS: Monitoring frequent items over distributed data streams

Abstract

Many applications require the discovery of items which have occur frequently within multiple distributed data streams. Past solutions for this problem either require a high degree of error tolerance or can only provide results periodically. In this paper we introduce a new algorithm designed for continuously tracking frequent items over distributed data streams providing either exact or approximate answers. We tested the efficiency of our method using two real-world data sets. The results indicated significant reduction in communication cost when compared to naïve approaches and an existing efficient algorithm called Top-K Monitoring. Since our method does not rely upon approximations to reduce communication overhead and is explicitly designed for tracking frequent items, our method also shows increased quality in its tracking results. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.