Edge computing represents a new paradigm that moves away from centralized clouds and brings computational processes as close as possible to data, mobile devices, sensors, and end users. It is one of the main innovations in the data infrastructure sector, and a strategic technology for the digital transformation of Europe, given that today, 80% of data is processed in the cloud* – a market currently dominated by non-EU companies. Within the broad IoT sector, evidence shows that demand is growing rapidly, and the European Digital Strategy predicts that in 5 years, 80% of data processing will be carried out by edge computing.

The Edge Computing paradigm aims to reduce the latency, bandwidth, geographical distance and energy consumption of the technological solutions. Our vision is that high-performance computing units and services, together with the reduction that Edge Computing brings, will allow the new models of intensive data processing to be executed outside the large computing centers of companies such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft, and closer to the sensors and edge devices, where the real data is produced.

This project proposes the development of an infrastructure that allows the deployment of distributed FaaS applications — Function as a Service — changing the way solutions are executed, by allowing their deployment in a continuous cloud-edge environment. An innovative AI– assisted adaptive serverless framework is proposed in order to create a continuous computing environment from the cloud to each device, enabling a huge set of new applications with transparent, secure, and interoperable access for the entire value chain of the solution. This framework is designed for large-scale geographic distribution, ensures low latency, and provides a secure, confidential, and accessible infrastructure that will enable new opportunities for developers and creators across multiple technology areas.

Role of Acisa

The current trends of connected vehicles and autonomous driving need to innovate transport systems, improve road safety, optimize traffic efficiency, and minimize accidents. However, the actual networks are not able to efficiently support the strict but dynamic requirements of V2X — Vehicle to Everything — services and need to overcome various challenges, such as, complexity management.

This calls for intelligent management and e2e — end to end — orchestration via a virtualized network infrastructure in order to facilitate different V2X services and guarantee certain levels of QoS imposed by them. In addition, transportation systems must be interoperable and support applications that could be deployed on the Edge, Cloud, or On-Premises.

Our role focuses on providing the latest technology for efficient mobility management and sustainable traffic orchestration in an e2e way through a virtualized network in order to offer different V2X services and guarantee certain levels of QoS. With the goal of helping managers of urban and metropolitan centers to monitor operations, reduce costs and ensure service quality through cloud, local or edge computing, our objective is to develop a virtualized environment, where we can implement the advanced functionalities of the new Acisa traffic light regulator called Mobility Hub — M-Hub.

Acisa’s M-Hub provides a state-of-the-art infrastructure for complex video processing and streaming data applications. It also provides advanced capacity in terms of computation and storage in order to support complex video applications, such as Augmented/Virtual Reality – AR/VR services, process data streams from V2X systems, or support AI models on the Edge for IoT applications.

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* Source: In-depth reviews of strategic areas for Europe’s interests