Distributed Programming of Smart Systems with Event-Condition-Action Rules

In recent years, event-driven programming languages, e.g. those based on Event Condition Action (ECA) rules, have emerged as a promising paradigm for implementing smart systems, such as IoT devices. Still, actual implementations are bound to a centralized infrastructure, limiting scalability and security. In this work, we present attribute-based memory updates (AbU), a new interaction mechanism aiming to extend the ECA programming paradigm to distributed systems. It relies on attribute-based communication, that is similar to broadcast, but receivers are selected “on the fly” by means of predicates over their attributes. With AbU, smart devices can be easily programmed via ECA rules and, at the same time, they can be deployed to a distributed network. Hence, a centralized infrastructure is not needed anymore: the computation is moved on the edge, improving reliability, scalability, privacy and security.