A Decentralized Architecture for Dynamic and Federated Access Control Facilitating Smart Tourism Services

Abstract

Edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) are inextricably linked, and much work has been devoted to strengthening their symbiotic relationship, providing better coverage and quality of service. These solutions are typically vertically tailored, provider-specific and bound to work within one administrative domain, as they presume direct deployment and ownership of the resources controlled in a centralised fashion. This model has effectively created a myriad of physically interconnected elements, logically broken down into separate domain-specific islands, each possibly applying different security/privacy policies, device and process control mechanisms, service access and provisioning schemes etc. To address this data and service balkanization phenomena, complex and time-consuming interactions between multiple providers are required to set up and operate federation of resources across domains and/or providers. Without loss of generality, we envision a scenario where stakeholders in a Smart Tourism ecosystem participate in resource federations to enrich their services and exploit complementarities. In this context, we present a decentralized architecture, relying on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), providing a flexible and effective federated access control mechanism to data and services.