Genoma: Distributed Provenance as a Service for IoT-based Systems

One of the key aspects of IoT-based systems, which we believe has not been getting the attention it deserves, is provenance. Provenance refers to those actions that record the usage of data in the system, along with the rationale for said usage. Historically, most provenance methods in distributed systems have been tightly coupled with those of the underlying data processing frameworks in such systems. However, in this paper, we argue that IoT provenance requires a different treatment, given the heterogeneity and dynamism of IoT-based systems. In particular, provenance in IoT-based systems should be decoupled as far as possible from the underlying data processing substrates in IoT-based systems.To that end, in this paper, we present Genoma, our ongoing work on a system for provenance-as-a-service in IoT-based systems. By "provenance-as-a-service" we mean the following: distributed provenance across IoT devices, edge and cloud; and agnostic of the underlying data processing substrate. Genoma comprises a set of services that act together to provide useful provenance information to users across the system. We also show how we are realizing Genoma via an implementation prototype built on Apache Atlas and Tinkergraph, through which we are investigating several key research issues in distributed IoT provenance.