RECAP is an-R + D + I Project financed by the European Commission through the Horizon2020 framework program (https://recap-project.eu/). Ten partners from six different countries work on the Project: three universities (Universitaet Ulm, Umea Universitet and Dublin City University); two research centers (Imdea Networks Foundation and Certh); two SMEs (Teito Sweden Support Services and Linknovate Science) and three large companies (Intel Research and Development, British Telecomunications Public Limited and SATEC).
The name RECAP corresponds to the title “REliable CAPacity provisioning and enhanced remediation for distributed cloud applications”, but beyond the title, RECAP was born with the general objective to develop a new generation of provision and support sustems that ensure the availability of new ICT (Information and Communications Technology) services that will be deployed in Cloud and Edge computing models (preocessing at the Edge of networks) highly distributed.
From the research point of view, we are looking for advances focused on the optimization of applications and systems, their simultations and IT automation and software orchestration enviroments. These advances are, among others, the modelingo of applications in mixed edge/cloud architectures; automatic modeling of systems workloads; data center infrastructure optimization systems; simulation of large scale Edge/cloud scenarios and the rehabilitation of complex distrtibutes networks and systems. Eventually, the challenge for the research party is to smooth the way for a radically new concept in the provision of services en the Edge/Clloud networks, where the services are elastically instantiated and deployed close to the users who really need them through self-configuring computing systems.
Private companies working on this project, with a closer view at the market, aproach three key areas for Cloou/Edge computing enviroments, and its heterogeneous architectures and underlying networks; (i) Support for the display of complex and highly distributed application components; (ii) grants for infraestructure management and (iii) suppor to infrastructure operations (for implementation time). These areas are applied through the development of four cases in use:
- Infrastructure and network management system, led by Tieto.
- Complex engine for Big Data analytics, led by Linknovate.
- Virtualization of network functions (NFV) and quality of sevice (QoS) managemet and remediation work, led by British Telecom.
- Large scale Edge/Cloud systems to support Smart cities, led by SATEC.
The use case developed by SATEC has focused on the área of IoT (Internet of Things) and on a proof of concept for digital/smart city enviroments.
The initial goal related to IoT was to develop a set of software components that allow the adaptation of current IoT platforms or frameworks to the new needs identified by researchers, particularly, the new mixed Edge/Cloud architectures and automatic provisioning systems and remediation. The components proposed and developed by SATEC have been the following:
- IoT flow collector: it is a light but high performance component that is not only capable of acquiring data flows from an IoT system (understanding a flow as a set of data sent by the same device, e.g. a meterorological center, a vehicle, etc., that sends different related or unrelated data), but that is also capable of carrying out its pre-precessing (filtering, data quality, etc.).
- Distributed storage system for IoT data: which ensures the availability and consistency of the data collected from any device, even when it changes its location and, therfore, its access node tod the network (in the case of mobile devices).
- IoT data distribution system: which allows access tod the data collected by an IoT system in the form of a subscription and both online and in batch mode, by users and applications.
Regarding the proof of concept, SATEC has developed a demonstrator that implements an IoT system for digital/Smart cities and an application for monitoring traffic ina a citua and for calculating driving routes.
Eventually, SATEC has extended the scope of the Project and has achieved the following results:
- Development of the originally proposed compnents: flow collector, distributed storage system and IoT data subscription system.
- Development of a new automatic display component for IoT: made out of a system that automatically displays any deployment made on the IoT platform (processing topology, network, data flows, etc), and another system that allows quick definition dashboards data and applications and its display and automatic execution.
- Development of a system for the definition of logical processing topologies: that allows to modify the physical connections (for example, to convert a physical network in the form of a web into a network in the form of a three more adapted to the needs of certain geographically displayed IoT systems).
- Development of a traffic monitoring application in the German city of Cologne: which displays various deashboards both for application (traffic data, heat maps of concentration of vehicles, routes, etc.) and system (network, nodes processing, logical topology, data flows, etc.).
- Definition of new IoT concepts and specification of a new architecture model for advanced IoT platforms in accordance with recent standards that are being published (ISO and UNE for example): this work has been documented in a technical article that has been accepted and published in the 5th Edition of the IEEE World Forum on IoT congress and SATEC was invited to present it at the congress.
- DevOps development systems integration as the Continuous Inegration and Continuous Display (CI/CD) model, as well as the use of IT automation tools and software orchestration.
