The Swarm at the Edge of the Cloud

This paper mainly discusses the opportunities and challenges of integrating sensors and cloud computing.

Background

In alignment with the Cloud and its all-present mobile access devices, a third layer of information acquisition and processing devices - called the sensory Swarm - is rapidly emerging, enabled by even more pervasive wireless networking and the introduction of novel ultra-low power technologies. The Swarm gives rise to the true emergence of concepts such as cyber-physical and cyber-biological systems, immersive computing, and augmented reality.

The TerraSwarm Research Center, at UC Berkley is addressing the huge potential (and associated risks) of pervasive integration of smart, networked sensors and actuators into our connected world.

https://www.terraswarm.org/index.html

Important Aspects

Swarm- Set of sensors and actuators devices interacting with users and the physical world.

TerraSwarm- the emerging cyber-physical network which consists of large number of sensors and actuators.

Swarmlets - The TerraSwarm applications which are characterized by their ability to dynamically recruit resources such as sensors, communication networks, computation and information from the cloud.

SwarmOS -  This will serve as a distributed executive and resource manager for TerraSwarm applications. The SwarmOS will mediate the needs of applications for services and clusters of resources where resource clusters may be, for example, a portion of a processor's resources, or a slice of bandwidth.

To achieve the idea of TerraSwarm, the authors propose a 3-level model comprising of Cloud as backbone that will offer extraordinary computing and networking capability, global data analytics, access and archiving. With the middle layer consisting of battery powered mobile devices which acts as the connection between nearby swarm devices and the cloud.

TerraSwarm research is aligned with the 4 major themes.

a. Realization of a “Smart City” scenario.

b. Platform architectures and operating systems.

c. Services, applications, and cloud interaction.

d. Methodologies, models, and tools.

Key Challenges in TerraSwarm

Characteristics of TerraSwarm - Large scale, Distributed, Cyber–physical, Adaptive, Heterogeneous.

1. The important challenges in TerraSwarm includes generation of massive amounts of the data, Data privacy and security.
2. A critical research challenge is how to recruit and compose heterogeneous resources, how to dynamically adapt applications to changing resources and contention for resources, and how to share resources without compromising safety, security, or privacy.
3. Need to develop an energy-efficient hardware support for encryption/decryption, authentication, and hardware-enforced key management.
4. Aggregation of data without compromise on Data privacy.
5. Ensuring that different components and subsystems of TerraSwarm can be dynamically recombined yet still function properly will require new, highly advanced development methodologies, models, and tools.
6. The security of information, actuation, and brokerage is essential to the success of the TerraSwarm vision. 
7. In the dynamic network of a TerraSwarm system, noninterference properties is very important.

Strengths of the Paper

1. Excellent introduction on the architecture, model, themes of the TerraSwarm.

2. Clearly provides the details about the TerraSwarm vision.

3. Clearly provides details about the challenges that are encountered in TerraSwarm and the issues are discussed to provide more details to the further research.

4. Multiple TerraSwarm applications have been discussed in alignment with the research. Examples includes consumer applications, Health-related applications etc. 

Discussion Points

1. Scalability of the TerraSwarm application is clearly not discussed in the paper.

2. How to do handle the interference between the different swarm devices in the TerraSwarm is not addressed.

3. Even though paper discusses on the ideas of data privacy and protection and suggests on the multiple potential techniques which might be used to increase data privacy, there is still no concrete vision on what exact protocols work for the Terraswarm. The techniques are vaguely discussed.

4. One of the challenges of TerraSwarm is real time transfer of data and processing on the cloud for mission critical systems. How to address this challenge is clearly not discussed.