Dealing with a growing amount of data is a crucial challenge for the future of information and communication technologies. More and more devices are expected to transfer data through the Internet, therefore new solutions have to be designed in order to guarantee low latency and efficient traffic management. In this paper, we propose a solution that combines the edge computing paradigm with a decentralized communication approach based on Peer-to-Peer (P2P). According to the proposed scheme, participants to the system are employed to relay messages of other devices, so as to reach a destination (usually a server at the edge of the network) even in absence of an Internet connection. This approach can be useful in dynamic and crowded environments, allowing the system to outsource part of the traffic management from the Cloud servers to end-devices. To evaluate our proposal, we carry out some experiments with the help of LUNES, an open source discrete events simulator specifically designed for distributed environments. In our simulations, we tested several system configurations in order to understand the impact of the algorithms involved in the data dissemination and some possible network arrangements.

To appear in the Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE/ACM 25th International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT)