Data Sovereignty at the Edge of the Network

Data sovereignty upholds that data is subject to the rules of the data provider and the applicable laws of the country where the data is collected. To achieve data sovereignty, various approaches have been proposed which rely on cloud computing resources to provide users with the necessary functionality to exchange sovereign data. However, when users are located far away from the cloud, using cloud resources can cause delays and potential network bandwidth bottlenecks. To address such issues, we propose an architecture that relies on edge computing resources. In this architecture, the components that handle the transfer of sovereign data are placed on-premise, allowing users to exchange data without using the cloud. To evaluate our approach, we conduct various experiments in a real-world setting using a system that follows the proposed architecture and a baseline that relies on the cloud. The results show that the proposed approach provides significant benefits, such as a ∼20% latency reduction and increased network bandwidth.