The ever-growing resource needs of modern-day applications regarding guaranteed low latency and the massive data transfer rate are constantly pushing the boundaries of technologies and requiring a paradigm shift. To cater for these escalating resource needs, modern IT computing platforms have evolved beyond the more traditional central cloud/DC with bleeding-edge processing powers and high-capacity networking infrastructure to extend their coverage all the way to the network edge, which may also include the far-edge nowadays. This creates a new paradigm called cloud edge computing continuum (CECC), whereby the services span from core cloud to edge and far edge. To efficiently manage and continuously optimize resources through this new model using the CECC approach, we propose an Agile and Cognitive Cloud-edge Continuum (AC3) management framework. This framework will play a critical role in providing scalability, agility, effectiveness, and dynamicity in service delivery over the CECC infrastructure. AC3 will offer a common and secure federated platform that manages data source, CECC resources, and application behaviour in a unified and harmonized manner to ensure the desired SLA and save energy consumption. Moreover, the AC3 platform can adapt to a different context and events happening in the network, such as lack of resources, data deluge, or mobility of data source, by managing (i.e., deploying or migrating) micro-services across CECC infrastructures. AC3 will leverage AI, ML, and semantic and context awareness algorithms to provide an efficient life cycle management system of services, data sources, and CECC resources for ensuring low response time and high data rate while saving energy consumption.

Small and Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) are an important driver for innovation and growth in the EU. SMEs also stand to gain the most from innovative technology, because it is complicated and costly for them to set-up and run ICT in the traditional way. Taking into account cyber-security, SMEs do not always understand all the risks and business consequences for the development of technologies without the adequate level of protection against cybercrime. The European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) declares on the “Information security and privacy Standards for SMEs” study of 2016 that, despite rising concerns on information security risks, the level of SMEs information security and privacy Standard adoption is relatively low. SMESEC consortium is proposing to develop a cost-effective framework composed of specific cyber-security tool-kit to support SMEs in managing network information security risks and threats, as well as in identifying opportunities for implementing secure innovative technology in the digital market; for this consortium, it is important that SMEs do not only look at cyber-security as an obstacle, but also they understand the business opportunity beyond it. In this scenario, an international group of experts proposes SMESEC as a response to the cyber-security challenges for business companies with a limited background on cyber-security and a restricted budget. The SMESEC project will be developed in 36 months by a competitive consortium of 12 partners from 7 countries, which corresponds to a well-balanced structure, involving big companies, SMEs, research centres and universities. Despite the great diversity of entities within the proposal, SMESEC is an industry-oriented project, since the private companies will cover more than 73% of the total project costs, and will be led by a big company, ATOS, with many years of experience on project management and cyber-security.

As 5G technology is maturing, and in view of new pervasive mobile services of different vertical industries, it will be a necessity to support massive numbers of coexisting network slices, with different performance requirements, functionality, and timespans. This puts significant strain on the management and orchestration system that traditional centralized designs, as in Cloud Computing and NFV, fail to cope with. MonB5G answers to these challenges, towards providing zero-touch management and orchestration in the support of network slicing at massive scales for 5G LTE and beyond. It proposes a novel autonomic management and orchestration framework, heavily leveraging distribution of operations together with state-of-the-art data-driven AI-based mechanisms. MonB5G is designed around a hierarchical approach that allows the flexible and efficient management of network tasks, while introducing a diverse set of centralization levels through an optimal adaptive assignment of monitoring, analysis, and decision-making tasks. MonB5G proposes a hierarchical, fault-tolerant, automated data driven network management system that incorporates security as well as energy efficiency as key features, in order to orchestrate a massive number of parallel network slices and significantly more diverse types of services in an adaptive and zero-touch way. MonB5G reuses standards-based MANO and MEC frameworks, extending them with embedded cognitive capabilities. It further provides trust mechanisms tailored to the targeted multi-stakeholder environment, for secure and trustworthy cross-domain operations. MonB5G has selected two use cases that will be trialed over the partners’ 5G testbeds, featuring automated, zero-touch slice management and orchestration across technical and administrative domains, enabling network operators to ensure end-to-end cross-domain SLAs, as well as AI-assisted policy-driven security monitoring and enforcement.

Superfluidity is “a state in which matter behaves like a fluid with zero viscosity”. Our project aims at achieving superfluidity in the network: the ability to instantiate services on-the-fly, run them anywhere in the network (core, aggregation, edge) and shift them transparently to different locations. The SUPERFLUIDITY project tackles crucial shortcomings in today’s networks: long provisioning times, with wasteful over-provisioning used to meet variable demand; reliance on rigid and cost-ineffective hardware devices; daunting complexity emerging from three forms of heterogeneity: heterogeneous traffic and sources; heterogeneous services and needs; and heterogeneous access technologies, with multi-vendor network components. The SUPERFLUIDITY solution is based on: a decomposition of network components and services into elementary and reusable primitives; a native, converged cloud-based architecture; the virtualization of radio and network processing tasks; platform-independent abstractions, permitting reuse of network functions across heterogeneous hardware platforms, while catering to the vendors’ need for closed platforms/implementations; and high performance software optimizations along with leveraging of hardware accelerators. As a result, the 5G network will benefit from: i) location-independence: network services deployable in heterogeneous networks; ii) time-independence: near instantaneous deployment and migration of services; iii) scale-independence: transparent service scalability; and iv) hardware-independence: development and deployment of services with high performance irrespective of the underlying hardware. Through these properties, SUPERFLUIDITY will provide a converged cloud-based 5G concept that will enable innovative use cases in the mobile edge, empower new business models, and reduce investment and operational costs. The SUPERFLUIDITY consortium gathers an impressive and uncommon blend of Telco and IT players that can make its vision a reality.