Serviços governados pela comunidade na borda da rede.

Abstract

The popularization of resource-rich smartphones has enabled a wide range of new applications to emerge. Typically, these applications use a remote cloud to process data. In many cases, the data processed (or part of it) is collected by the users’ devices and sent to the cloud. In this architecture, the external cloud provider is the sole responsible for defining the governance of the application and all its data. This is not satisfactory from the privacy viewpoint, and may not be feasible in the long run. This document proposes an architecture in which the service is governed by the users of a community who have a common problem to solve. To make it possible, the concepts of Participatory Sensing, Mobile Social Networks (MSN) and Edge Computing were used, which enable data processing closer to the data sources (i.e. the users’ devices). This work describes the proposed architecture and a case study to assess the feasibility and quality of our solution compared with other solutions already in place. The case study uses simulation experiments fed with real data from the public transport system of Curitiba, a city in the South of Brazil with a population of approximately 2 million people. The results show that the proposed approach is feasible, and can aggregate as much data as current approaches that use remote dedicated servers. Differently from the all-or-nothing sharing policy of current approaches, the approach proposed allows users to autonomously configure the trade-off between the sharing of private data, and the performance that the application can achieve.