RTI2018-094532-B-I00
Researchers: Xavi Masip, Eva Marín, Sergi Sánchez , Albert Alonso Beltrán, Jordi Garcia, Adrià Asensio, Ester Simó, Francesc Aguiló, Marisa Zaragoza, Albert Alonso, Wilson Ramírez, Ayaz Hussain, Heribert Pascual
Duration of the Project: from January 2019 until September 2022
In the recent years the Internet evolution has undergone a remarkable and unstoppable change of trend, rooted on four main pillars, the advent of new technologies (cloud/fog computing, SDN, NFV, etc.), broad connectivity (4G/5G, VANET, etc.), the open data availability, and the wide deployment of smart edge devices (smart phones, sensors, wearables, etc.), all setting the main concept for the Internet of Things (IoT). In practice IoT encompasses smart scenarios such as those refered to as smart cities, ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems), smart homes or e-health, whose main objective focuses on the development of new services, with a high societal impact. From a technological perspective, the deployment of this set of envisioned new services brings in highly demanding challenges, mainly driven by the imposed requirements linked to aspects such as fast processing capacities (fast decision-making), low latency and high security. Aiming at provisioning such requirements, the fog computing concept recently came up with the aim of nearing the cloud capacities to the edge, what definitely paves the way to meet the required performance constraints, reducing network load, reducing latency, speeding up decision making processing and easing security guarantees. Fortunately, fog does not exclude cloud, rather it complements and optimizes cloud performance, so as those services that cannot be implemented in the lower fog level (lack of processing or storage capacities), will keep demanding higher fog levels or cloud, and those services requiring specific fog skills (low latency, security) may run close to the edge device. The F2C paradigm is coined to identify a hierarchical fog-to-cloud architecture, putting together all resources from the edge up to the cloud requiring a coordinated management for an optimal service execution. This architecture has been preliminary introduced recently in the National project GUAU and is proposed to be extended in MIAU in three main directions, first enriching the architecture towards IoT, turning into a F2C-IoT model leveraging recent technologies and solutions (AI, blockchain, etc.) to develop new functionalities, second making interoperability a must, and third tuning the architecture to adopt a collaborative model, aligned to the current trends in other domains (UBER, AirBnB), based on resources sharing policies yet to be defined. More specifically, the proposed MIAU framework will manage the heterogeneous F2C-IoT scenario addressing 6 main challenges, i.e., mobility, security, data management, orchestration, interoperability and resources sharing. The MIAU project proposes two real-world use cases, seating in the traffic and the e-health sectors, deployed in a smart city pilot implemented in the CRAAX lab, both to be used for validation purposes.