Developing an edge computing platform for real-time descriptive analytics

Abstract: The Internet of Mobile Things encompasses stream data being generated by sensors, network communications that pull and push these data streams, as well as running processing and analytics that can effectively leverage actionable information for transportation planning, management, and business advantage. Edge computing emerges as a new paradigm that decentralizes the communication, computation, control and storage resources from the cloud to the edge of the network. This paper proposes an edge computing platform where mobile edge nodes are physical devices deployed on a transit bus where descriptive analytics is used to uncover meaningful patterns from real-time transit data streams. An application experiment is used to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of our proposed platform to support descriptive analytics at a mobile edge node and generate actionable information to transit managers.