Dynamic Decentralization Domains for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing are fostering a future of ecosystems hosting complex decentralized computations that are deeply integrated with our very dynamic environments. Digitalized buildings, communities of people, and cities will be the next-generation “hardware and platform,” counting myriads of interconnected devices, on top of which intrinsically distributed computational processes will run and self-organize. They will spontaneously spawn, diffuse to pertinent logical/physical regions, cooperate and compete, opportunistically summon required resources, collect and analyze data, compute results, trigger distributed actions, and eventually decay. What would a programming model for such ecosystems look like? Based on research findings on self-adaptive/self-organizing systems, this article proposes design abstractions based on “dynamic decentralization domains”: regions of space opportunistically formed to support situated recognition and action. We embody the approach into a Scala application program interface (API) enacting distributed execution and show its applicability in a case study of environmental monitoring.