The Swarm at the Edge of the Cloud

The paper presents a vision of the future where thousands of smart sensing devices per person interact with other sensing devices, mobile personal devices and cloud to form a three tier structure that projects a TerraSwarm vision. 

This web of sensing devices form a swarm and the terraswarm application that makes use of such a system are called swarmlets. The authors believe that the swarm based systems can have at least as much impact as web when it was launched. 

Development and management of such a large scale system comes with its own challenges. The paper discuses four themes to address these challenges. The first of the themes focuses on idea of smart cities where swarmlets can drive innovation. The other themes include - 

1. Platform architecture and operating systems
2. Services, applications and cloud interaction
3. Methodologies, models and tools

Key Points :

• The most important factor in the transition from single application with dedicated set of resources to terraswarm application is the privacy and security of the information being shared in the swarm network.

• Large scale presence of distributed network of swarm posses a big challenge of management, security and policy control.

• Such an implementation needs “SwarmOS” which provides a support for continual reconfiguration of applications due to the dynamic nature of the sending devices and solution to the resource management problems when swarmlets are involved in a race condition.

• Implementation of an adaptive system due to the dynamic nature of the environment.

• TerraSwarm vision has the potential to disrupt consumer and enterprise market due to its context aware design and the wide range of application domains it can run.

Strengths

• The paper presents a clear vision of the structure of TerraSwarm and overview of interaction between swarm applications, swarm resources and swarmOS.

• One of the very strong points of the paper is the acknowledgement of the challenges due to the highly scaled model of the swarm and the ever changing nature of the swarm environment.

• The 4 theme model presented for addressing the challenges provide an overview for future researchers and swarm application developers.

Weakness and Discussions

• Data accrued by the sensors is highly sensitive and is at greater risk of being targeted by cyber criminals. Solution to such security risks presented by the integration and sharing of sensor data with multiple third-party vendors are not addressed in this paper.

• The paper talks about development and configuration of applications which have not been invented yet without giving details about the scope and viability of such applications.

• Continuously evolving nature of the swarm environment posses a difficulty in testing and verifying functionality of the applications components.

• The paper does not address the communication and interfacing problems associated with the multilayered application interaction.

• Potential cloud service failures can disrupt the commercial IT market. However, failure of services which support TerraSwarm applications like healthcare and disaster management can have more serious life threatening consequences.