Data and Service Management in Densely Crowded Environments: Challenges, Opportunities, and Recent Developments

Densely crowded environments such as stadiums and metro stations have shown shortcomings when users request data and services simultaneously. This is due to the excessive amount of requested and generated traffic from the user side. Based on the wide availability of user smart-mobile devices, and noting their technological advancements, devices are not being categorized only as data/service requesters anymore, but are readily being transformed to data/ service providing network-side tools. In essence, to offload some of the workload burden from the cloud, data can be either fully or partially replicated to edge and mobile devices for faster and more efficient data access in such dense environments. Moreover, densely crowded environments provide an opportunity to deliver, in a timely manner, through node collaboration, enriched user-specific services using the replicated data and device-specific capabilities. In this article, we first highlight the challenges that arise in densely crowded environments in terms of data/service management and delivery. Then we show how data replication and service composition are considered promising solutions for data and service management in densely crowded environments. Specifically, we describe how to replicate data from the cloud to the edge, and then to mobile devices to provide faster data access for users. We also discuss how services can be composed in crowded environments using service-specific overlays. We conclude the article with most of the open research areas that remain to be investigated.