On Participatory Service Provision at the Network Edge with Community Home Gateways

:Edge computing is considered as a technology to enable new types of services which operate at the network edge. There are important use cases in ambient intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) for edge computing driven by huge business potentials. Most of today's edge computing platforms, however, consist of proprietary gateways, which are either closed or fairly restricted to deploy any third-party services. In this paper we discuss a participatory edge computing system running on home gateways to serve as an open environment to deploy local services. We present first motivating use cases and review existing approaches and design considerations for the proposed system. Then we show our platform which materializes the principles of an open and participatory edge environment, to lower the entry barriers for service deployment at the network edge. By using containers, our platform can flexibly enable third-party services, and may serve as an infrastructure to support several application domains of ambient intelligence.