TIM Edge & Cloud Continuum project, approved by the European Union in December 2023, includes a specific research deliverables schedule at the end of June and the end of December, each year.
By mid 2024, all deliverables under the plan had been completed, leading to results that better defined the context of each research strand, and laid the foundations for subsequent deployments.
An initial set of results concerns the development of an open source “Telco Cloud” solution, capable of supporting both Telco network functions - e.g. belonging to the 5G network - and customer applications on the edge nodes. In particular, releases in the first half of the year were aimed at optimising the computational capacities required at the edge node, and setting up energy metrics to reduce Telco Cloud solutions' consumption impact.
A second set of results concerns the exposure of additional features of the Telco Cloud domain toward application developers, with the aim of overcoming the current limitations of reference solutions. In particular, in the first half of the year, two APIs (Application Programming Interface) were defined: the first, in the Energy Efficiency field, will offer information on the energy consumption and environmental impact of services provided at the edge nodes; while the second, in the Internet of Things field, will grant the option to request the provision of network resources to support IoT traffic.
An additional line of work concerns the development of Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence tools and functions. In this area, the initial version of the metrics and analysis collection platform was designed in the first half of the year, to monitor the performance and energy consumption of the infrastructure supporting automation. In addition, a study was conducted to define the architecture and functionalities required for the federation of data from different domains, with the aim of fostering the deployment of new services on the cloud.
The deployment of tools for the automation of Telco Cloud solutions (the so-called 'Orchestration') was another important set of activities conducted: the first version of a 'cloud-native orchestrator' was released, to manage the automation of cloud services and resources autonomously. Through a specific study on the solution's design, the aim was to ensure easy integration and reusability of application components, containment of operating costs and timely control of resources.
Lastly, the project aims to develop prototype application solutions to experiment with the performance enabled by the software components completed. In this area, the design of a smart monitoring system for green mobility was identified, to monitor the flow of passengers on buses, providing valuable information to citizens and government, and reduce traffic congestion, improve air quality, and promote a more sustainable mobility. What's more, the architectural requirements for a platform to support the streaming of extended reality applications for very high quality digital tourism scenarios with a high degree of immersiveness, availability and ease of use were identified.
These initial results will evolve in the next deliverables, gradually leading the experimental solutions towards more and more complete, efficient and high-performing solutions, while preserving a high innovation standard. Indeed, the deliverables scheduled for December 2024 are already under definition, including the roll out of the first edge nodes on which the experimental software solutions will be deployed.