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Raul Garcia Hemonnet
Video conferencing, big data, the Internet of Things, smart cities or autonomous vehicles are technologies that are giving rise to numerous applications available to users.
Each computing context: cloud (anywhere in the world), 'edge' (geographically close centers), and 'fog' (personal devices) is most conducive to different types of applications.
The EDGEDATA-CM project, in which the URJC participates together with the UCM, the UPM and the IMDEA center of the Community of Madrid, wants to integrate through the development of a new computing and storage infrastructure that will favor the operation of said applications .
The Rey Juan Carlos University has worked mainly on the development of videoconferencing software (OpenVidu) in collaboration with the company naevatec. For this type of application, the most favorable computation is the one developed at the 'edge'. "Latency is very important, so that it is reasonable and fluid communication can be developed, it is interesting that the servers are as close as possible to us," explains Micael Gallego, Researcher of the group SoftDev (several of the members of this group have participated in the project) and professor in the area of 'cloud computing' and web development (School of Computer Engineering).
This computation at the 'edge' causes the process to be closer, "at the URJC we have raised this on a more theoretical level," says Gallego. Other universities have put it into practice with an online gaming company, an application that also needs low latency.
numerous applications
The EDGEDATA-CM project, in addition to video conferencing or online games, may have applications related to smart cities, communication between autonomous cars to notify accidents or the delivery of goods, "there are already supermarkets that have local computer centers synchronized with each other to be able to deal with the distribution even if there is a drop in supply”, explains the URJC researcher. Likewise, the project also generates a data protection infrastructure through 'blockchain' technology.
fruitful work
When it comes to developing the various aspects of the project, the work between institutions has been fruitful, mainly due to the fact that it has included various disciplines distributed among universities and centers, “many synergies have been generated. We have been able to think of ideas, design strategies, etc. It has been one more collaboration at the level of researchers from each discipline”.
EDGEDATA-CM (Infrastructure for highly decentralized hybrid systems) has been financed, from January 2019 to April 2023 by the Ministry of Education and Research (Community of Madrid), through the Program of R&D Activities between Research Groups in Technologies 2018, co-financed the Operational Programs of the European Social Fund (ESF) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
A project that is now ending and that contributes to the creation of a more secure infrastructure and computing for the operation of applications and data storage.