Researcher Engineering - Edge and cloud computing technologies (RE1)

Internet of Things (IoT) involves massive numbers of sensing devices with different capabilities, ranging from low-complexity sensors to smart cameras and actuators, generating huge volumes of data, which can be transformed into valuable knowledge through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data technologies. In this context, an effective combination of edge and cloud computing technologies (a.k.a. compute continuum) has been rising as an emerging paradigm that: (1) allows bringing computation closer to the data sources, bringing down latency and energy consumption with respect to cloud computing, enabling novel real-time services for domains such as smart city; and (2) provides high-performance capabilities for data intensive algorithms. Moreover, the advent of newest communication technologies (e.g., 5G) can offer the necessary bandwidth, ultra‐low latency, and massive device connectivity needed to distribute applications across the compute continuum, and also supports novel architectures for Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). Unfortunately, edge and cloud computing and networks technologies have been evolving in parallel, and they are not fully integrated, leaving a gap that must be addressed to jointly leverage the compute computing capabilities.
The research activities will be focused on one or several of the following topics, among others:
1. Design of orchestration policies that meet specific application requirements, jointly taking into account computing and communication resources in a distributed edge/cloud computing environment.
2. Explore architectures and protocols to support the integration of edge computing in 5G and beyond communication systems.
3. Development of advanced data analytics pipelines, addressing different application domains, including but not limited to smart mobility, precision agriculture, etc.