A wide range of real-time applications process stream-based data. To process this stream-based data in an application-independent manner, many stream processing systems have been built. However, none of them reached a huge domain of applications, such as databases did. This is due to the fact that they do not consider the specific needs of real-time applications. For instance, an application which visualizes stream-based data has stringent timing constraints, or may even need a specific hardware environment to smoothly process the data. Furthermore, users may even add additional constraints. E.g., for security reasons they may want to restrict the set of nodes that participates in processing. Thus, constraints naturally arise on different levels of query processing.

In this work we classify constraints that occur on different levels of query processing. Furthermore we propose a scheme to classify the constraints and show how these can be integrated into the query processing of the distributed data stream middleware NexusDS.