CODECO

The goal of CODECO is to develop a novel cognitive Edge-Cloud management framework that enables more flexible service provisioning and operation across the entire Edge-Cloud continuum. To this end, the project develops software toolkits for the intelligent management of highly distributed environments based on heterogeneous networks that integrate mobile and resource-constrained devices.

The CODECO components enhance the management and orchestration of Edge-Cloud services with cognitive and cross-layer adaptation mechanisms. In addition, they enable intelligent decision-making for computation offloading and the dynamic adaptation of network resources. In doing so, application requirements, network requirements, data security, data sensitivity, and other context-dependent aspects of data flows are taken into account.

CODECO supports the next generation of intelligent services, with a particular focus on dense deployment scenarios in B5G and 6G networks. To this end, the project investigates a range of use cases in the domains of smart cities, manufacturing, energy, and smart infrastructures. At its core is an IoT Edge-Cloud orchestration approach that jointly considers data, computing, and network adaptation through a cross-layer methodology.

The consortium, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Rute C. Sofia, Head of fortiss' Industrial IoT Competence Field, brings together a total of 16 partners from EU Member States as well as the associated countries Israel and Switzerland. The consortium represents a diverse range of organizations, including SMEs specializing in open-source software and innovation management (Inova+, Eclipse Foundation, Almende), leading universities (University of Göttingen, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, University of Piraeus Research Center), research institutes (fortiss, i2CAT, Athena), and major international companies such as ATOS, Telefónica, Siemens, Intracom Telecom, Red Hat, Netcompany-Intrasoft, and IBM.

Key research contributions:

• Automated configuration and cognitive edge-cloud management, taking into account cross-layer behavior (application to the network), data and meta-data management, and policy enforcement
• Data privacy-based decentralized learning and context-awareness, addressed in a cross-layer manner, and focusing on federated learning methods that are better suited to the orchestration of data/workflow/computation operations and networking.
• Dynamic scheduling and workload migration. Addresses challenges derived from the higher degree of automation due to container and workload mobility between nodes in a single cluster and across different clusters.
• Joint orchestration of computational and networking resources. On the one hand, the networking infrastructure needs to become more flexible, intent- and context-driven, i.e., the network should be viewed and processed as a single system. On the other hand, joint computational and networking paradigms, that by design integrate aspects such as security/trustworthiness, mobility support, decentralized and flexible naming spaces, are key to building a smart, decentralized edge ecosystem.
• Global view of data in the IoT-edge-cloud continuum. Where are datasets stored, what are their characteristics, and what constraints limit how data can be processed and replicated? To achieve this, CODECO will collect and manage metadata (data that provides information about other data) and make it available to the orchestration and other system components.

Horizon Europe CODECO is funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101092696

01.01.2023 - 31.03.2026