Self-organising coordination regions: A pattern for edge computing

Design patterns are key in software engineering, for they capture the knowledge of recurrent problems and associated solutions in specific design contexts. Emerging distributed computing scenarios, such as the Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Edge Computing, define a novel and still largely unexplored application context, where identifying recurrent patterns can be extremely valuable to mainstream development of language mechanisms, algorithms, architectures and supporting platforms—keeping a balanced trade-off between generality, applicability, and guidance. In this work, we present a design pattern, named Self-organising Coordination Regions (SCR), which aims to support scalable monitoring and control in distributed systems. Specifically, it is a decentralised coordination pattern for partitioned orchestration of devices (typically on a spatial basis), which provides adaptivity, resilience, and distributed decision-making in large-scale situated systems. It works through a self-organising construction of regions of space, where internal coordination activities are regulated via feedback/control flows among leaders and worker nodes. We present the pattern, provide a template implementation in the Aggregate Computing framework, and evaluate it through simulation of a case study in Edge Computing.