Organising LTL Monitors over Distributed Systems with a Global Clock

The paper Organising LTL Monitors over Distributed Systems with a Global Clock has been accepted in RV 2014: the 14th International Conference on Runtime Verification, September 22 – September 25, 2014 Toronto, Canada.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

Users wanting to monitor distributed systems often prefer to abstract away the architecture of the system, allowing them to directly specify correctness properties on the global system behaviour. To support this abstraction, a compilation of the properties would not only involve the typical choice of monitoring algorithm, but also the organisation of submonitors across the component network. Existing approaches, considered in the context of LTL properties over distributed systems with a global clock, include the so-called orchestration and migration approaches. In the orchestration approach, a central monitor receives the events from all subsystems. In the migration approach, LTL formulae transfer themselves across subsystems to gather local information.

We propose a third way of organising submonitors: choreography — where monitors are orgnized as a tree across the distributed system, and each child feeds intermediate results to its parent. We formalise this approach, proving its correctness and worst case performance, and report on an empirical investigation comparing the three approaches on several concerns of decentralised monitoring.