More than a year ago I have first written about event processing and mobile devices, and illustrated this picture, showing the possible roles of mobile devices as producers, consumers, front-end and dashboard carrier. Now I am concentrating on the "EPA on mobile", which means that mobile devise (phone, tablet, smart sensor etc...) can host the actual execution engine of event processing. One of the questions raised is why is it needed, typically people think on mobile devices as end points, front ends, and collection points, while the actual processing is executed on a server (cloud, mobile back-end server etc...).
There might be multiple reasons to run event processing on mobile:
First -- mobile devise may be off-line (e.g. when I am travelling abroad, wherever there is no WiFi connection, my mobile phone is in off-line, since mobile data connection is very expensive out of the country).
Second -- there are various sensors attached to a mobile device, whether these are the internal sensors of the devise itself, or a sensor network wired locally to a mobile devise (e.g. tablet). In many cases events are emitted frequently, and raw events are relevant only at the local level. Sending them to the back-end requires both communication cost, and has high toll on power consumption, which is still the weak spot of mobile devices.
Third --- there are also privacy considerations, such as processing events that the owner does not want to share with the rest of the universe.
Recently I have learned about some implementations done now in this area, they are hybrid implementations, certain part of the overall logic might run on a mobile device, while part might run in the back-end.
running open source event processing on mobile devices. I guess that this will see much more of it, as the world moves to mobility, and to the Internet of Everything.
