Dynamic decentralization domains for the Internet of Things - Simulation Repository

The Internet of Things and edge computing are fostering a future of ecosystemshosting complex decentralized computations, deeply integrated with our very dynamicenvironments. Digitalized buildings, communities of people, and cities will be thenext-generation “hardware and platform”, counting myriads of interconnected devices, on top ofwhich intrinsically-distributed computational processes will run and self-organize. They willspontaneously spawn, diffuse to pertinent logical/physical regions, cooperate and compete,opportunistically summon required resources, collect and analyze data, compute results, triggerdistributed actions, and eventually decade.How would a programming model for such ecosystems look like? Based on research findings onself-adaptive/self-organizing systems, this paper proposes design abstractions based on“dynamic decentralization domains”: regions of space opportunistically formed to supportsituated recognition and action. We embody the approach into a Scala API to enact distributedexecution on a network of devices and show its applicability in a case study of environmentalmonitoring.

物联网与边缘计算正孕育着一个未来，其中生态体系承载着复杂的去中心化计算，与我们的动态环境深度融合。数字化建筑、人群社区以及城市将成为下一代‘硬件与平台’，汇聚万千互联设备，其上运行着本质上分布式的计算过程，并实现自我组织。这些计算过程将自发产生、扩散至相关的逻辑/物理区域，协作与竞争，适时召唤所需资源，收集并分析数据，计算结果，触发分布式行动，并最终协同发展。那么，针对此类生态体系的编程模型将呈现何种面貌？基于对自我适应/自我组织系统的研究结果，本文提出基于‘动态去中心化领域’的设计抽象：为支持情境识别与行动而适时形成的空间区域。我们将此方法具体化为Scala API，以在网络设备上执行分布式执行，并在环境监测案例研究中展示了其适用性。