Building an intelligent edge environment to provide essential services in smart cities

Smart Cities will cause major societal change because they will provide a comprehensive set of key services including seamless communication, intelligent transport systems, advanced healthcare platforms, urban and infrastructure management, and digital services for local and regional government. Thus, a new service and networking environment which will provide low latency and sustainable high bandwidth is needed to build new applications and services for smart cities. In this system services will be managed from the edge of the Internet and not from the centre as they currently are. This represents a new computing paradigm which is called the Intelligent Edge Environment. This paper looks at how to build this new ecosystem. Firstly, a new framework which comprises seven layers is unveiled, showing the functions that must be supported to realise this brave new world. New mechanisms are then introduced and a small prototype is developed to support storage in highly mobile environments. The results show that this approach could be used to build smart city digital platforms. The paper ends by discussing the development of a Distributed Operating System for smart cities

Developing an implementation framework for the future internet using the Y-Comm architecture, SDN and NFV

The Future Internet will provide seamless connectivity via heterogeneous networks. The Y-Comm Architecture is a reference model that has been developed to build future mobile systems for heterogeneous environments. However, the emergence of Software Defined Networking and Network Functional Virtualization will allow the implementation of advanced mobile architectures such as Y-Comm to be prototyped and explored in more detail. This paper proposes an implementation model for the Y-Comm architecture based on these mechanisms. A key component is the design of the Core Endpoint which connects various peripheral wireless networks to the core network. This paper also proposes the development of a Network Management Control Protocol which allows the management routines running in the Cloud to control the underlying networking infrastructure. The system being proposed is flexible and modular and will allow current and future wireless technologies to be seamlessly integrated into the overall system

Recommending investors for crowdfunding projects

To bring their innovative ideas to market, those embarking in new ventures have to raise money, and, to do so, they have often resorted to banks and venture capitalists. Nowadays, they have an additional option: that of crowdfunding. The name refers to the idea that funds come from a network of people on the Internet who are passionate about supporting others' projects. One of the most popular crowdfunding sites is Kickstarter. In it, creators post descriptions of their projects and advertise them on social media sites (mainly Twitter), while investors look for projects to support. The most common reason for project failure is the inability of founders to connect with a sufficient number of investors, and that is mainly because hitherto there has not been any automatic way of matching creators and investors. We thus set out to propose different ways of recommending investors found on Twitter for specific Kickstarter projects. We do so by conducting hypothesis-driven analyses of pledging behavior and translate the corresponding findings into different recommendation strategies. The best strategy achieves, on average, 84% of accuracy in predicting a list of potential investors' Twitter accounts for any given project. Our findings also produced key insights about the whys and wherefores of investors deciding to support innovative efforts

Prospects for Internet technology

This paper surveys the current developments in Internet technology, with a particular emphasis on performance, and the growing need for various guarantees of quality of service. It discusses hardware technologies for increased bandwidth, mechanisms for requesting and providing specific qualities of service, and various scaling issues. Fi-nally it discusses mechanisms needed for (but not the economics of) the Internet in the mass market. To this end, we survey changes in the areas of addressing, and flow management. 1

Kadupul: Livin' on the edge with virtual currencies and time-locked puzzles

Devices connected to the Internet today have a wide range of local communication channels available, such as wireless Wifi, Bluetooth or NFC, as well as wired backhaul. In densely populated areas it is possible to create heterogeneous, multihop communication paths using a combination of these technologies, and often transmit data with lower latency than via a wired Internet connection. However, the potential for sharing meshed wireless radios in this way has never been realised due to the lack of economic incentives to do so on the part of individual nodes. In this paper, we explore how virtual currencies such as Bitcoin might be used to provide an end-to-end incentive scheme to convince forwarding nodes that it is profitable to send packets on via the lowest latency mechanism available. Clients inject a small amount of money to transmit a datagram, and forwarding engines compete to solve a time-locked puzzle that can be claimed by the node that delivers the result in the lowest latency. This approach naturally extends congestion control techniques to a surge pricing model when available bandwidth is low. We conclude by discussing several latency-sensitive applications that would benefit for this, such as video streaming and local augmented reality systems.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under Trilogy 2 project, grant agreement no 317756.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACM via http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2753488.275349

Y-Comm: a global architecture for heterogeneous networking.

In the near future mobile devices with several interfaces will become commonplace. Most of the peripheral networks using the Internet will therefore employ wireless technology. To provide support for these devices, this paper proposes a new framework which encompasses the functions of both peripheral and core networks. The framework is called Y-Comm and is defined in a layered manner like the OSI model

Policy, legal and regulatory implications of a Europe-only cloud

This article explores key legal and regulatory issues arising from recent cloud localization initiatives, with a particular focus on calls to establish a Europe-only cloud. The analysis covers jurisdictional conflicts and extraterritoriality concerns, as well as the impact on fundamental rights such as privacy, data protection and freedom of expression