A Case for User-Defined Governance of Pure Edge Data-Driven Applications

The increasing popularity of smartphones, associated with their capability to sense the environment, has allowed the creation of an increasing range of data-driven applications. In general, this type of application collects data from the environment using edge devices and sends them to a remote cloud to be processed. In this setting, the governance of the application and its data is, usually, unilaterally defined by the cloud-based application provider. We propose an architectural model which allows this kind of application to be governed solely by the community of users, instead. We consider members of a community who have some common problem to solve, and eliminate the dependence on an external cloud-based application provider by leveraging the capabilities of the devices sitting on the edge of the network. We combine the concepts of Participatory Sensing, Mobile Social Networks and Edge Computing, which allows data processing to be done closer to data sources. We define our model and then present a case study that aims to evaluate the feasibility of our proposal, and how its performance compares to that of other existing solutions (e.g. cloud-based architecture). The case study uses simulation experiments fed with real data from the public transport system of Curitiba city, in Brazil. 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.