Applications in the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) add an additional layer of complexity over traditional robotics, namely, networking and communication with the edge and the cloud. The field of cloud robotics has already revolutionized robotic systems, among others, by offloading computationally intensive tasks to the cloud. However, existing approaches are not necessarily suitable for real-time communication and distributed computing, and are not natively supported by widespread robotic middlewares such as ROS 2. Traditional Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have been widely adopted for secure communication, but often introduce complexity in the setup and latency that can hinder real-time performance. Zenoh, an emerging data-centric networking framework, offers an alternative with low-latency, efficient data dissemination optimized for edge-to-cloud scenarios. Zenoh also integrates seamlessly with ROS 2, enabling lower overhead communication. This paper presents a comparative study of VPN and Zenoh in edge-cloud robotics, focusing mainly on communication latency, data throughput, and fault tolerance within a real-world robotic use case. Through experimental analysis, we highlight the strengths and limitations of both approaches and provide insight into their suitability for distributed robotic applications. The findings contribute to understanding the trade-offs between security, latency, and scalability in networking solutions for the IoRT.

The cloud-to-edge-to-IoT continuum represents a seamless flow of data processing and management, spanning from centralized cloud services to distributed edge computing and interconnected IoT devices. This paradigm can become very challenging in real implementations, especially in the presence of multiple stakeholders using proprietary and heterogeneous software and hardware. The Horizon Europe NEPHELE project proposes the virtualization of IoT devices through a specific software stack called Virtual Object Stack (VOStack) that promotes openness and interoperability. In this paper, we present an implementation of VOStack using W3C Web of Things (WoT) standard in a post-disaster domain for two different types of IoT devices: a ground robot (Turtlebot2) for navigation and mapping in an unknown environment, and a Raspberry Pi 3 acting as a wireless sensor network gateway. We propose an application graph for the resulting hyper-distributed application (HDA) and present our first implementation to validate the proposed solution.

Several relevant research and innovation activities have recently investigated the technical and economic advantages of cloud computing for the provisioning of telco service infrastructures, in particular towards all-IP next generation 5G networks. In fact, the evolution of telco service infrastructures traditionally requires a significant upfront investment (and a long adoption process). Conversely, cloud exploitation significantly lowers investment risks by potentially providing elasticity in service provisioning via flexible Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on top of a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Infrastructure. In this context, the paper presents novel solutions that we have designed, implemented, and evaluated within the EU FP7 Mobile Cloud Networking project (MCN). Their aim is to achieve cost-effective elastic provisioning of telco services over heterogeneous and federated cloud providers, with the specific focus of supporting the extreme quality levels that are demanded by traditional, non-virtualized, and dedicated telco infrastructures. In particular, we concentrate on how to effectively and efficiently automate service state migration for coarse-grained telco service (cloudified) components by leveraging industry-mature orchestration technologies and cloud management frameworks. While our proposed state migration model and procedure are general, its implementation is experimented for MCN's Rating, Charging, and Billing as a Service (RCBaaS). This MCN functionality has been chosen by purpose due to its challenging reliability and uptime requirements. The reported experimental and simulation results show the technical feasibility of the proposed solution under different and realistic load conditions for next-generation and cloudified 5G services.

As systems get more complex testing has also increased not only in complexity but in the total IT cost, which is estimated to increase even more by 2020. Testing large complex distributed applications is hard, time consuming and lacks tooling. Given that the digitisation of business has proved to be a key aspect for improving the productivity of developers in the delivery of the service to end-users, in this paper we present early results showing how these capabilities can also be provided to testers of software and services, by adopting standard interfaces and leveraging the tools provided by an early research open-source platform, capable of efficiently testing large scale systems, ElasTest.

Distributed cloud storage solutions are currently gaining high momentum in industry and academia. The enterprise data volume growth and the recent tendency to move as much as possible data to the cloud is strongly stimulating the storage market growth. In this context, and as a main requirement for cloud native applications, it is of utmost importance to guarantee resilience of the deployed applications and the infrastructure. Indeed, with failures frequently occurring, a storage system should quickly recover to guarantee service availability. In this paper, we focus on containerized cloud storage, proposing a resilience monitoring solution for the recently developed Rook storage operator. While, Rook brings storage systems into a cloud-native container platform, in this paper we design an additional module to monitor and evaluate the resilience of the Rook-based system. Our proposed module is validated in a production environment, with software components generating a constant load and a controlled removal of system elements to evaluate the self-healing capability of the storage system. Failure recovery time revealed to be 41 and 142 seconds on average for a 32GB and a 215GB object storage device respectively.

This paper states the research done in building a Wildfire Propagation Simulation tool able to present graphically, how the fire will be propagated in case of a wildfire. The core of this tool was developed using Cellular Automata (CA) relayed on mathematical foundations for modeling the propagation and the transition rules of the CA. Also, the mathematical model was combined with a geographical information system provided by Google Maps API, allowing to conduct a simulation that considers the kind and density of vegetation in a specific zone of interest. Finally, we define and perform a full simulation providing information for managing and predicting wildfires and, the future works derived from this research.

Quality and high speed is the new mantra: everyone wants the best products delivered as fast as possible. On the one side, managers aim at “ ​the fastest time to market”​; on the opposite side, the cliché recurs that “ ​a good user experience is the key to a successful product​”. Compounding both sides, developers know well that before they can release their software, ​testing is a must​. Notwithstanding, it is often ignored or given low priority, why? Are the integrated systems tested enough at their ends to meet the user-demanded functionalities? Software code is written, transformed, and updated, then it is checked-in and verified before a new product is finally launched. But not always this translates into the best software solution or the best experience for users. Is it all about continuous integration process or are there more reasons? With the increasing need of distributed and more interconnected software systems, are developers ready to satisfy this demand?

Over the last couple of decades, the demand for storage in the Cloud has grown exponentially. Distributed Cloud storage and object storage for the increasing share of unstructured data, are in high focus in both academic and industrial research activities. At the same time, efficient storage and the corresponding costs are often contrasting parameters raising a trade-off problem for any proposed solution. To this aim, classifying the data in terms of access probability became a hot topic. This paper introduces Hera Object Storage, a storage system built on top of OpenStack Swift that aims at selecting the most appropriate storage tier for any object to be stored. The goal of the multi-tiering storage we propose is to be automated and seamless, guaranteeing the required storage performance at the lowest possible cost. The paper discusses the design challenges, the proposed algorithmic solutions to the scope and, based on a prototype implementation it presents a basic proof-of-concept validation.

There is no doubt that the delivery of services to end-users is and has been a huge productivity gain for developers. This is a key aspect when one talks about digitisation of business today. The same should also be provided to testers of software and services. In this paper we present early results that show how service delivery and composition of multiple service instances is achieved for testers. This is made possible through the adoption of standard interfaces and an early research platform, ElasTest.

Robots are moving out of factories, service robotics is bringing them to our homes, work environments, cities, and outdoors. While the Robot Operating System (ROS) is promising to open the world of robotics to developers, a proper platform and ecosystem supporting robotic applications development is still missing. This work presents an example of cloud robotics application in which cloud computing is not just complementing limited robot capabilities, but is leveraged to provide a development and operations environment supporting the complete life-cycle of a robotics-enabled application. We relate on our experience building cloud robotics applications spanning heterogeneous hardware (i.e., robots and cloud servers) through a use case scenario.

The fast growing development of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) trends and the remarkable progress of Software Defined Networking (SDN) have yielded a synergy between both, towards the provision of convergent networking solutions. Since the traditional networking principles were not designed according to the NFV principles, a work has emerged dedicated to protocol redesign among the academic fellows and the industry representatives. A typical example that has been introduced in such eco-system is the concept of network service chaining, as a composition of virtual network functions stitched together in a logically ordered fashion, to create an integral networking service that can be owned by network administrators, programmers, cloud- and telco-operators. This appoints SDN as an essential technology enabler in administering advanced traffic steering techniques, thanks to the SDN controller's capability to dynamically manage VNFs virtual connections and underlying dataplane flows. Despite the rapid progression, the strategies for traffic steering in NFV environment, are still facing imminent challenges to be addressed. This paper joins NFV and SDN technology into a novel traffic steering solution based on open source reference implementations (such as SDK for SDN, virtual Traffic Classifier, virtual Media Transcoder, and WAN Infrastructure Connection Manager) designed with performance and network optimizations in mind. We have successfully deployed and tested the system prototype in a real datacenter. The evaluation results of the prototype system: (1) validated the presented chain use cases, (2) affirmed an efficient performance and scalability of the chaining method, and (3) certified good quality of video traffic transmission and transcoding.

The objective of this paper is to illustrate how to monetize infrastructures and services. This is achieved by a combination of measuring consumption, applying pricing strategies and client invoicing. Furthermore, a range of billing solutions are available in order to cover the Rating, Charging and Billing process. The focus here is on the comparison of solution based suitability, which depends on complexity of records and volume of transactions. RCB Cyclops, as an open source solution, is presented and evaluated in terms of data throughputs focusing on doubling host machines and yielding 70-80% boost in performance.

Network Functions Virtualization allows Communication Service Providers to extend their traditional service portfolio to new models of service offerings, such as Virtualized Network Functions as a Service (VNFaaS), in which network functions can be traded following the “on-demand” Cloud paradigm. Incremental deployment and interoperability with legacy infrastructure, in particular Wide Area Network (WAN) domains and enterprise services, are key requirements to make this vision come true in the short/medium term. This paper discusses the main challenges that need be addressed for the adoption of VNFaaS in production environments and is particularly focused on the integration of NFV and WAN. To this end, two components are proposed: Netfloc, to support traffic steering inside NFV infrastructure points of presence, and the WAN Infrastructure Connectivity Manager (WICM), to handle the integration of virtualized network functions with WAN connectivity services, as a composed end-to-end network service.

Running applications in the cloud efficiently requires much more than deploying software in virtual machines. Cloud applications have to be continuously managed: (1) to adjust their resources to the incoming load and (2) to face transient failures replicating and restarting components to provide resiliency on unreliable infrastructure. Continuous management monitors application and infrastructural metrics to provide automated and responsive reactions to failures (health management) and changing environmental conditions (auto-scaling) minimizing human intervention.In the current practice, management functionalities are provided as infrastructural or third party services. In both cases they are external to the application deployment. We claim that this approach has intrinsic limits, namely that separating management functionalities from the application prevents them from naturally scaling with the application and requires additional management code and human intervention. Moreover, using infrastructure provider services for management functionalities results in vendor lock-in effectively preventing cloud applications to adapt and run on the most effective cloud for the job.In this paper we discuss the main characteristics of cloud native applications, propose a novel architecture that enables scalable and resilient self-managing applications in the cloud, and relate on our experience in porting a legacy application to the cloud applying cloud-native principles. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The setup of distributed computing clusters and the installation of data analysis frameworks can be cumbersome and requires a great deal of knowledge in a plenitude of fields. We have developed DISCO, a service which is alleviating the data scientist from these hurdles. This paper shows up the competitiveness of DISCO with an existing solution.

In the last years we have experienced a growing industrial interest in Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) as the opportunity to exploit the cloud computing paradigm through Network Function Virtualization (NFV), primarily with the goal to reduce CAPEX/OPEX for future mobile networks deployment and operation. The gain from the point of view of infrastructure costs reduction is almost clear and recognized, while many technical challenges are still to be solved, especially with industry-mature solutions, due to the complexity of managing such type of infrastructures. In particular, the dynamicity and flexibility introduced by the virtualization of network functions add novel requirements on the service management and orchestration layers. In this perspective, this paper originally presents the architecture and primary implementation guidelines of the Mobile Cloud Networking framework developed within a large EU FP7 project. More specifically, it focuses on the innovative technical elements of our solution for service management and orchestration, namely i) orchestration strategies based on resource unit affinity and ii) compliance with emerging Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) standards. To practically demonstrate the suitability of the proposed approach, a specific real use case has been implemented, i.e., the cloudification of the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), by reporting and analyzing the related performance results.

In this position paper, we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss national research infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any centralized management entities. A coordinated national research infrastructure can only be established by federating the local resources of the individual institutions. We discuss current efforts and business models for a federated infrastructure.