Multi-Provider, Multi-Vendor, Multi-Player Orchestration: From Distributed Cloud to Edge and Fog Environments in 5G

On June 18th, RECAP will co-organise a EuCNC workshop entitled ‘Multi-Provider, Multi-Vendor, Multi-Player Orchestration: From Distributed Cloud to Edge and Fog Environments in 5G’ in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Network Service Providers are limited in maximizing usage efficiency of their resources and limited in revenue generation capability from rigid service offerings which often take longer to provision. A first step towards improving this situation requires mechanisms for contracting, invoking and settling for the wholesale consumption of resources and virtual network services, in a way that these services can be rapidly provisioned and invoked. Services (multi-vendor) will be programmed, as opposed to physically deployed and configured, on top of virtual resources, from multiple operators, that can now be flexibly allocated and sliced. This conglomerate of federated resources should simultaneously support an extremely diverse range of networking and computing requirements to meet the specific needs of vertical industries.

Some 5G applications impose quite challenging requirements (e.g., very low latency), stressing the network and cloud infrastructures needing to relax the initial assumption of pure centralized resources, to enable resources being closer to the end users. In this scenario, to efficiently address the increasing computing requirements of 5G services, satisfying at the same time other service-specific constraints such very low latency, there is a clear need for new architectural approaches for 5G. In this context, edge computing promises to enable a certain level of centralisation and, as such, efficiency gains, addressing at the same time the high bandwidth and very low latency requirements of 5G services. Ege computing is inspired by the computing cloud paradigm, but aims to minimise the service delay associated with the transportation of data through the cloud, where the distance between end devices and compute resources is large or/and the network resources are limited. To address these issues, edge computing has been proposed to deploy computing resources closer to end users. Fog and Edge computing allows end devices to perform computation offloading of their tasks to edge servers, which execute the computational tasks on behalf of the end devices.

This workshop aims at putting in common the results in the area of multi-actor orchestration, fog and edge computing, by strengthening the liaison between the participating projects, facilitating the exchange of ideas and helping each research group to take advantage of the results produced by other projects, improving focus of innovation and aligning towards common goals and milestones, thus maximising the overall impact.

The workshop will provide the links between 5G-PPP phase 1 projects and new 5G-PPP projects conducting research in the areas of SDN and NFV multi-domain orchestration and federation, fog, edge and distributed cloud computing, empowering effective knowledge transfer, potent partnerships and mutual collaboration amongst them. The participants will have the opportunity to exchange ideas, share hands-on experience and solutions and discuss research results. The workshop will aim in extending collaborations and paving common exploitation strategies.

The RECAP speakers will include Prof. Theo Lynn (DCU) and Aidan Gallagher (InishTech). Professor Theo Lynn is Professor of Digital Business at DCU Business School and is the Principal Investigator of the Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce, an Enterprise Ireland/IDA funded Cloud Computing Technology Centre. Professor Lynn specializes in the role of digital technologies in transforming business processes. He has won over 200 grants and is an author on over 150 journal articles, book chapters and conference papers in both business and computer science. He is currently a PI on the H2020-CloudLightning and RECAP projects. Previously, he was Associate Dean (Industry Engagement and Innovation) at DCU Business School (2015-2017), Business Innovation Platform Director for DCU (2015-2016) and Director of the Leadership, Innovation and Knowledge Research Centre at DCU (2009-2011). He is a regular speaker at both academic and industry conferences. Professor Lynn is an award-winning entrepreneur and has founded and sold a number of businesses. He advises a number of domestic and international companies. He will present the RECAP approach to capacity provisioning in cloud/edge/fog environments. Aidan Gallagher is the CEO of InishTech, a software licensing and protection services spinout from Microsoft. Aidan has over 30 years’ experience in the Global ICT sector, primarily in leading the international Sales and Marketing operations of global software companies. Prior to InishTech, he was Executive Vice President of Similarity Systems, now part of Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ:INFA), and Executive Vice President of Global Internet Security company, Baltimore Technologies (NASDAQ:BLM). He is a Member of the Board of eSpatial, a leading provider of cloud mapping software and is Chairman of Aircraft Management Technologies. Aidan’s talk will focus on licensing and entitlement issues in fog and edge computing.

For more information and to register, please visit https://www.eucnc.eu/.