fastcloud - Realizing real-time cloud applications
Abstract
To disrupt next-generation communication networks (e.g. 5G) and future internet architectures (FIA), FASTcloud aims to leverage the state of the art concepts such as fog and mobile edge computing (MEC) in order to facilitate real-time computation closer to mobile users near the edge of the network. This paradigm shift aims to offer a significantly higher Quality of Service (QoS) under latency requirements of less than 1 millisecond as in the context of Industry 4.0, the Internet of Everything (IoE), connected cars, and mission-critical event-based sensor-actuator networks.
This holistic and modern view of distributed clouds which are closer to the end users encompasses the following set of challenges and potential technology domains;
- Agile edge clouds which are context & location aware. Such clouds are elastically created, resized, moved or cloned based on the demand of the nearby end users and the resources available to serve the dynamic workloads at certain geographical micro-segments. High-fedelity telemetry information is thusly required on both: the application layer as well as the network-layer so as to meet the dynamics of network churn and service mobility constraints.
- Efficient state synchronization between distributed clouds which span multiple administrative domains. Proactive replication and predictive migration with respect to the latency constraints, energy consumption and resources availability is a multi-objective optimization problem which needs to be dynamically tuned according to the workloads and the telemtry learned from the mobile services.
- Re-programmable networks which could be adapted, re-configured at run time so as to re-route packets as efficiently as possible subject to the aforementioned constraints. Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Service Function Chaining (SFC) are three sub-disciplines which offer attractive solutions which need to be combined in concert in order to facilitate traffic re-routing, network slicing and isolation between stateful service ensembles during, before and after migration/cloning.
- Context-aware security protocols and lightweight crypto algorithms which are adaptive to high-frequency migration across federated networks but yet, impose minimum to low communication overhead in order to meet the QoE and latency-free premises of FASTcloud. Additionally, reliability and resillience dimensions need to be factored in during state replication and network slicing in a multi-tentant environment with co-scheduling in mind.
In summary, FASTcloud solves a multi-pronged real-time optimization problem so as to offer a high QoS with minimum latency to cloud and network-sensitive applications by cloning and migrating them closer to the end user at the edge of the network. Through this project, a holistic testbed for agile edge clouds is to be developed so as to concretly study, understand and influence the standardization process of the tactile internet as part of the IETF/IRTF.
