Combining edge and cloud computing for mobility analytics

TL;DR

This paper explores a hybrid edge-cloud architecture for mobility analytics, aiming to improve transit system management by efficiently processing data streams from IoMT devices at the edge and in the cloud.

Contribution

It proposes a combined edge and cloud computing framework for mobility analytics, with preliminary prototype results demonstrating its application to transit data processing.

Findings

Edge processing detects data issues before cloud transfer

Cloud handles complex graph analytics for mobility insights

Prototype supports real-time transit data analysis

Abstract

Mobility analytics using data generated from the Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) is facing many challenges which range from the ingestion of data streams coming from a vast number of fog nodes and IoMT devices to avoiding overflowing the cloud with useless massive data streams that can trigger bottlenecks [1]. Managing data flow is becoming an important part of the IoMT because it will dictate in which platform analytical tasks should run in the future. Data flows are usually a sequence of out-of-order tuples with a high data input rate, and mobility analytics requires a real-time flow of data in both directions, from the edge to the cloud, and vice-versa. Before pulling the data streams to the cloud, edge data stream processing is needed for detecting missing, broken, and duplicated tuples in addition to recognize tuples whose arrival time is out of order. Analytical tasks such as data filtering, data cleaning and low-level data contextualization can be executed at the edge of a network. In contrast, more complex analytical tasks such as graph processing can be deployed in the cloud, and the results of ad-hoc queries and streaming graph analytics can be pushed to the edge as needed by a user application. Graphs are efficient representations used in mobility analytics because they unify knowledge about connectivity, proximity and interaction among moving things. This poster describes the preliminary results from our experimental prototype developed for supporting transit systems, in which edge and cloud computing are combined to process transit data streams forwarded from fog nodes into a cloud. The motivation of this research is to understand how to perform meaningfulness mobility analytics on transit feeds by combining cloud and fog computing architectures in order to improve fleet management, mass transit and remote asset monitoring