Towards Policy-aware Edge Computing Architectures

Cloud computing offers an economical and elastic means to handle the storage and computation needs of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, storage and retrieval from the cloud could potentially violate policies, especially those pertaining to data privacy. Edge computing as a paradigm is a suitable way to overcome these issues. This paper presents a policy-aware edge computing architecture that enables policy-aware normalization and filtration of the data that is sent to cloud services to preserve policies. We use a secure and encrypted channel to transmit the data generated by the IoT devices to the dedicated computing units at the edge of the network. Our architecture offers programmers the ability to configure the system easily and perform a predetermined set of computation tasks on the data, e.g., tasks to uphold privacy policies such as blurring faces, license plates, etc.