A Geo-distributed Architectural Approach Favouring Smart Tourism Development in the 5G Era

The fast-paced evolution of ICT technology is revolutionizing our every day life, endowing us with a seamless digital assistant accessible through smart-devices. In this context, even the way we approach tourism and holidays has undergone many changes. In fact, most of us nowadays exploit smart devices to plan, book and manage the experience. This different approach to tourism is often called Smart Tourism and it is acquiring more and more importance for business, public administrations, and tourists themselves. The idea behind our proposal is to further enhance existing structure and services of a city, promoting and encouraging the smart tourism concept while satisfying the ever increasing necessity, dynamicity and stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements future application scenarios embody. To this end, we propose a conceptual architectural model following a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) approach, exploiting virtualization and multiple geographically distributed Function as a Service (FaaS) edge clouds equipped with storage capabilities. While preserving the general aspect of our study and without loss of generality, we envision a reference scenario where users consume and produce data that are geographically bound to a location of interest. This modus operandi could help unlock smart tourism potential, focusing on local communal phenomena, harvesting socio-technical data which would otherwise not be possible on a global scale through traditional centralized information systems. Along with the proposal, we discuss some preliminary evaluation of the envisioned platform, outlining some research directions.