Project description
Out of the cloud and into the fog: a clearer vision of our interconnected future
Data traffic continues to increase dramatically, pushing the need for ever more efficient, secure and reliable systems with reduced power consumption to transmit data at great distances with high temporal resolution. Apart from telecommunications, the transition to the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 brings with it cloud-computing apps that will be required to handle scenarios from robotic plant operations to mission-critical self-driving cars. The EU-funded ELASTIC project is developing a system architecture based on fog computing, positioning resources closer to where they are needed at the edge of the network. The new architecture will be ready to handle the increasingly stringent requirements, efficiently orchestrating resources to match data demands while optimising energy efficiency, security and data integrity.
Objective
Big data is nowadays being integrated in systems requiring to process a vast amount of information from (geographically) distributed data sources, while fulfilling the non-functional properties (real-time, energy-efficiency, communication quality and security) inherited from the domain in which analytics are applied. Examples include smart cities or smart manufacturing domains.
ELASTIC will develop a novel software architecture (SA) to help system designers to address this challenge. The SA will incorporate a novel elasticity concept to distribute and orchestrate the resources across the compute continuum (from edge to cloud) in an innovative fog computing environment. The new elasticity concept will enable to match analytics workload demands and fulfilling non-functional properties. The fog computing architecture will incorporate energy-efficient parallel architectures, combined with innovative distributed storage, secure communications and advanced cloud solutions. Overall, the SA will enable the combination of reactive data-in-motion and latent data-at-rest analytics into a single extreme-scale analytics solution, in which the analytics workloads will be efficiently distributed across the compute continuum based on their suitability and data processing needs.
The capabilities of ELASTIC will be demonstrated on a real smart-mobility use case, featuring a heavy sensor infrastructure to collect data across the Florence tramway network, equipped with advanced embedded architectures, heterogeneous sensors, V2I connectivity and access to cloud resources. Representative applications for advanced driving assistant systems, predictive maintenance and public/private transport interaction, have been selected to efficiently process very large heterogeneous data streams from distributed sensors.
ELASTIC technology will enable the development of innovative mobility services while preparing the technological background for the advent of full autonomous mobility systems.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologycivil engineeringurban engineeringsmart cities
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencebig data
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencedata processing
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
08034 Barcelona
Spain