ExtremeDataHub – Towards a Secure and Flexible Personal Data Platform on the Edge

Overview

Internet of Things is becoming the key enabler for highly intelligent data rich applications and is the major technology behind smart computing domains like smart homes, connected health, connected cars, automated enterprise workflows, Smart Cities and Smart grid. Ericsson predicts the number of connected IoT devices to be around 18 billion by 2022. This significant growth and penetration of smart and IoT devices come along with a tremendous increase in the number of smart and IoT applications. These various applications, which support various domains and services, generate and access different data patterns such as periodic, event-based, realtime and continuous data. Consequently, these different applications result in diverse traffic characteristics that require different performance levels of reliability, loss, and latency. To cope with these various traffic characteristics and requirements, it is now necessary to have greater visibility and control over the traffic generated from smart and IoT devices in order to guarantee an optimized performance of smart and IoT applications as well as high quality of experience to users. In this research, we design and develop an open-source, flexible, and programmable networked edge device that collates and mediates access to our sensitive and personal data, under the data subjects control as well as to cope with various characteristics and requirements of smart and IoT applications that access this data in order to provide better performance and quality of experience to users.

The main goal of this research is to leverage and combine SMILE project of Dr. Nadeem and Databox project of Dr. Haddadi into a holistic integrated platform; ExtremeDataHub. SMILE - SMart and Intelligent wireLess Edge is a framework that supports Software Defined Network (SDN)-like paradigm at user smart devices and network wireless-edges enabling network wireless-edges to become more active and providing truly end-to-end management and control in which users could reap the full benefits of SDN. Databox is an open-source personal networked device augmented by cloud-hosted services enabling individuals to manage their data and to provide other parties with controlled access to their data.

Figure 1 shows the proposed ExtremeDataHub platform that runs on edge devices (e.g., WiFi access point, stand-alone edge unit). Similar to SMILE design, ExtremeDataHub modules are divided into two main components: ExtremeDataHub data plane and ExtremeDataHub control plane. ExtremeDataHub data plane consists of both SMILE data plane (i.e., forwarding network components) and the three main data access components of Databox (i.e., driver, store, app). On the other hand, ExtremeDataHub control plane consists of Northbound-API (NB API), Southbound-API (SB API), local edge controller/manager running on edge devices, and the global controller/manager that could run on switches/controllers in case of enterprises (i.e., coordinated environment of multi ExtremeDataHub devices), or in cloud in case of uncoordinated ones. ExtremeDataHub control plane is a logically centralized entity in charge of managing and controlling the ExtremeDataHub data plane through Southbound API while providing abstract network and data views through Northbound API to applications and services.

People

PI

• Tamer Nadeem

PhD Students

• Mohammed Ayyat
• Hana B. Pasandi

Funding

• NSF CNS 1836870: "ICE-T: RI: Towards a Secure and Flexible Personal Data Platform on the Edge”

Documentation

• "ExtremeDataHub - Secure and Flexible Personal Data Platform on the Edge" at the GEFI Meeting in Coimbra, Portugal on November 2019. (ExtremeDataHub Slides)
• "Towards a Secure and Flexible Personal Data Platform on the Edge" at the ICE-T PI Meeting in Coimbra, Portugal on November 2019. (ICE-T PI Meeting Slides)

Publications

• Mostafa Uddin, Tamer Nadeem, Santosh Nukavarapu, "Extreme SDN Framework for IoT and Mobile Applications Flexible Privacy at the Edge", The 17th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom’19), Kyoto, Japan, March 11 - 15, 2019
• Ahmed Nasr, Tamer Nadeem. "A Novel Technique for Gait Analysis using Two Waist Mounted Gyroscopes", IEEE Global Communications Conference (GlobeCom), Waikoloa, HI, USA, December 9-13, 2019. (Accepted)
• Hannaneh Pasandi, Tamer Nadeem, "Collaborative Intelligent Cross-Camera Video Analytics at Edge: Opportunities and Challenges", The International Workshop on Challenges in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Internet of Things (AIChallengeIoT 2019) in conjunction with ACM SenSys 2019, New York, NY, USA, November 10, 2019. (Accepted)
• Tamer Nadeem, Mohammed Ayyat. "Towards a Secure and Flexible Personal Data Platform on the Edge". (Under Preparation for a conference submission)