We are living in a world in which innovation technologies, cloud computing, internet of things, big data and high speed WIFI networks have made possible applications that were inconceivable few decades ago. As a result, the quality of life is improving and better commercial decision are taken thanks to data analysis. In recent years, as a result of the innovation and new needs there was a boom in distributed systems applied to different contexts such as Internet of Things that has led to new computational paradigms such as fog computing, edge computing, cloud computing and block chain.

The main goal of EDGEDATA-CM is to go beyond the state of the art in terms of new architectures for these technologies as well as to propose hybrid solutions combining them. Edge computing is a technique to move data and computation closer to the data sources, outside the cloud but without leveraging user device capabilities. Its goal is to offer storage and computing power close to the user on the edge of the network in order to reduce the latency and response time.

Fog computing is a new distributed architecture with a better distribution of core functionalities: computation, communication, control, storage and management. The idea is to execute the software near to the data sources, including in small devices. Block chain is a novel technology with the potential to change our community. Nowadays, this technology is being used in very different scenarios: digital money management, registry management, logistic, border control, etc. The main challenges of fog/edge/cloud computing are the management of the infrastructure, data management, testing on that setting, and efficient communications. In particular, fog nodes have very limited resources but, with high performance capabilities. Edge nodes have more resources than fog nodes but not enough to run the heavy virtualization software currently used in cloud environments. Even so, edge nodes need to be managed in an easy and flexible way as we do with cloud nodes.

On one hand, there is the need of new architectures that allows the deployment of complex applications running in different layers fog/edge/cloud. On the other hand, these kind of distributed architectures makes really hard the testing phase that is crucial to assure the quality of the systems. Finally, real time analytical algorithms must run in the cloud over all the data collected from the edge and fog nodes.

EDGEDATA-CM will provide a data management infrastructure for fog nodes, an environment where applications are deployed and managed in hybrid fog/edge/cloud context. The infrastructure will be enriched with a testing system allowing the debugging of applications in these kind of complex hybrid systems.

For block chain the infrastructure is targeted to tackle digital money applications because they are the most important scenario for the technology. To take advantage of the technology power we need to analyse from a theoretical point of view all the algorithms, be able to decompose the different functionalities in order to extract the build blocks usable to create new solutions for different kinds of problems and use cases.