Jukka Riekki

Henna Kokkonen, Lauri Lovén, Naser Hossein Motlagh et al.

Future AI applications require performance, reliability and privacy that the existing, cloud-dependant system architectures cannot provide. In this article, we study orchestration in the device-edge-cloud continuum, and focus on edge AI for resource orchestration. We claim that to support the constantly growing requirements of intelligent applications in the device-edge-cloud computing continuum, resource orchestration needs to embrace edge AI and emphasize local autonomy and intelligence. To justify the claim, we provide a general definition for continuum orchestration, and look at how current and emerging orchestration paradigms are suitable for the computing continuum. We describe certain major emerging research themes that may affect future orchestration, and provide an early vision of an orchestration paradigm that embraces those research themes. Finally, we survey current key edge AI methods and look at how they may contribute into fulfilling the vision of future continuum orchestration.

Lauri Lovén, Roberto Morabito, Abhishek Kumar et al.

The edge-cloud computing continuum demands self-management mechanisms that scale across autonomous administrative domains while honouring tenant- and operator-specified data sovereignty. We present Neural Pub/Sub, a federated-broker autonomic substrate whose self-organising behaviour emerges from market-based price signals rather than centralised control. Its MAPE-K control loop closes over per-broker health and load monitoring, marginal-cost clearing-price analysis, placement planning over a polymatroidal feasibility region, federated cross-domain dispatch, and shared peer subscription summaries with bounded-staleness price signals. The Plan step is anchored in a Walrasian convergence proposition: under gross-substitutes valuations on tree and series-parallel service-dependency DAGs, decentralised price-based allocation matches the welfare of a centralised oracle. We evaluate the substrate on a 4-VM, 4-domain, 48-worker federated edge-cloud testbed (single data centre, 50 ms emulated WAN) in a 1005-run campaign augmented by a fair-process-count sharded-oracle comparator. The federated market dominates a single-process oracle by 2-4% with 45 of 45 per-seed wins (sign-test p ~ 2.8e-14, Hodges-Lehmann median -39.6 ms); against a four-shard centralised orchestrator at equal process count the gap stays within +/-1.5% across all nine (pipeline, load) cells. Round-robin completion rate collapses 98.8% -> 22.4% -> 3.3% across arrival rates 5/10/15 pps while the market preserves completion; the advantage decomposes into three Walrasian properties (information completeness, admission control, price discovery). Federation withstands broker death and network partition (completion rate >= 98.7% across 75 cells), and sovereignty enforcement adds no measurable runtime overhead across 60 governance-grid runs. Heterogeneous-domain stressors and cross-site WAN deployment remain future work.

Jukka Riekki, Aarne Mämmelä

We propose a vision for directing research and education in the ICT field. Our Smart and Sustainable World vision targets at prosperity for the people and the planet through better awareness and control of both human-made and natural environment. The needs of the society, individuals, and industries are fulfilled with intelligent systems that sense their environment, make proactive decisions on actions advancing their goals, and perform the actions on the environment. We emphasize artificial intelligence, feedback loops, human acceptance and control, intelligent use of basic resources, performance parameters, mission-oriented interdisciplinary research, and a holistic systems view complementing the conventional analytical reductive view as a research paradigm especially for complex problems. To serve a broad audience, we explain these concepts and list the essential literature. We suggest planning research and education by specifying, in a step-wise manner, scenarios, performance criteria, system models, research problems and education content, resulting in common goals and a coherent project portfolio as well as education curricula. Research and education produce feedback to support evolutionary development and encourage creativity in research. Finally, we propose concrete actions for realizing this approach.

Juuso Haavisto, Muhammad Arif, Lauri Lovén et al.

Edge computing that leverages cloud resources to the proximity of user devices is seen as the future infrastructure for distributed applications. However, developing and deploying edge applications, that rely on cellular networks, is burdensome. Such network infrastructures are often based on proprietary components, each with unique programming abstractions and interfaces. To facilitate straightforward deployment of edge applications, we introduce OSS based RAN on OTA commercial spectrum with DevOps capabilities. OSS allows software modifications and integrations of the system components, e.g., EPC and edge hosts running applications, required for new data pipelines and optimizations not addressed in standardization. Such an OSS infrastructure enables further research and prototyping of novel end-user applications in an environment familiar to software engineers without telecommunications background. We evaluated the presented infrastructure with E2E OTA testing, resulting in 7.5MB/s throughput and latency of 21ms, which shows that the presented infrastructure provides low latency for edge applications.

Xiang Su, Jarkko Hyysalo, Mika Rautiainen et al.

Privacy is a key challenge for continued digitalization of health. The forthcoming European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is transforming this challenge into regulatory directives. User consent provisioning and coordinating across data services will be the keys in addressing this challenge. We suggest a privacy-driven architecture that provides tools for providing user consent as a service. This enables managing and reusing private health information between a large amount of data sources, individuals and services, even when they are not known beforehand. The proposed architecture integrates data security and semantic descriptions into a trust query framework to provide the required interoperability and co-operation support for future health services. This approach provides benefits for all stakeholders through safer data management, cost and process savings, multi-provider services, and services based on emerging new business models.

Altti Ilari Maarala, Xiang Su, Jukka Riekki

Advances in ICT are bringing into reality the vision of a large number of uniquely identifiable, interconnected objects and things that gather information from diverse physical environments and deliver the information to a variety of innovative applications and services. These sensing objects and things form the Internet of Things (IoT) that can improve energy and cost efficiency and automation in many different industry fields such as transportation and logistics, health care and manufacturing, and facilitate our everyday lives as well. IoT applications rely on real-time context data and allow sending information for driving the behaviors of users in intelligent environments.