Work Plan

WP1 is responsible for ensuring a strong management of EDGELESS, with the following objectives: (i) ensure successful
achievement of the project objectives on time and within budget; (ii) establish the appropriate communication and
reporting channels to the EC; (iii) achieve a common scientific and technical direction within the project; (iv) conduct
continuous quality assurance activities for the operation of the project and the production of its scientific and technical
results within its lifespan; (v) continuously monitor the project’s progress and timely initiate corrective actions, if needed;
(vi) realise synergies amongst the project members and effective exploitation of the project’s’ results; (vii) perform
risk assessment and timely activate contingency actions as required; (viii) coordinate the organisation and execution of
the various project meetings and participation of the project in various external or self-organised events; (ix) establish
effective framework and procedures for efficient communication, collaboration and fast and accurate decision-making;
(x) manage the legal, financial and administrative duties of the project.

WP2 is in charge of laying the foundations for a smooth development of all the technical contributions of EDGELESS
in an integrated architecture. Such a challenging goal will be achieved through the following objectives: (i) derive
and specify the functional and technical requirements of the EDGELESS platform; (ii) scouting of state-of-the-art
technologies to be used as starting point for project’s innovation; (iii) define a shared representation of serverless
resources and microservice elements, allowing their composition into the orchestrated application; (iv) design, specify
and update the EDGELESS reference architecture.

WP3 is responsible for developing the fundamental building blocks that form—in their combination—the unique and
novel basis for the EDGELESS serverless edge computing system. These building blocks derive from the heterogeneous
hardware and software environment and the diverse demands applications may put forward, as reflected by example
in the target use cases identified for validation (WP5). To provide the underpinning of the versatile service creation
and orchestration environment as will be developed in WP4, WP3 has the following objectives: (i) devise real-time
edge analytics —cognitive and AI-driven monitoring, algorithms, and tools— to assess the status of the edge computing
infrastructure at different geographic (local or not), administrative (single or cross provider), and time (from seconds to
minutes to hours); (ii) extend virtualisation support to small devices to allow the EDGELESS architecture to embrace
to date unsupported low end hardware such as microcontrollers and other low-power devices and allow them to
contribute their resources to the EDGELESS environment, thereby enriching the diversity and enhancing the availability
of resources; (iii) enable function-oriented service execution at the edge to make use of and thus exploit specialised
hardware capabilities and preserve the diversity of the edge infrastructure; (iv) support end user trust in edge services
by means of verifiable execution and and without leaking or using personal data beyond the explicit intent of the user;
(v) capture security and trust properties as an inherent element of unifying abstraction across the diverse hardware and
OS properties; (vi) implement and validate the above building blocks qualitatively as well as their performance within
the respective tasks.

P4 manages the planning and execution of the activities related to the design and development of the EDGELESS
services, which are outlined in Section 1.2.1, consistently with the requirements and overall architecture defined in WP2.
Its main objectives include: (i) develop reference implementations of the ε-controller, ε-orchestrator, and ε-balancer by
augmenting state-of-the-art open source solutions with novel extended features set to achieve EDGELESS objectives
and vision; (ii) design the ancillary services (e.g., state persistence) in the use cases of interest and develop a reference
implementation, leveraging available open source tools that are suitable to be integrated in the EDGELESS architecture;
(iii) elaborate and define APIs and protocols for a smooth and efficient operation of the EDGELESS components in
a cluster made of edge nodes with limited computation and connectivity capabilities; (iv) harmonise operation across
clusters in the edge-cloud continuum, considering that they may operate at different time scales and different degrees
of coupling may be needed, e.g., by exploiting statistical models; (v) exploit distributed AI algorithms for scalable and
efficient orchestration and resource scheduling in a cluster, under high diversity and variability; (vi) validate individually
all the above contributions, in terms of both correctness (via unit tests) and performance (using ad hoc formal, analytical
or simulation tools).

WP5 is responsible for the integration and system-level validation, in both laboratory and realistic environments, of the
project components, continuously contributed by all the other technical WPs. In addition it provides back results and
indications to advance EDGELESS products’ maturity and stability. This materialises in the following WP objectives: (i)
perform continuous integration of the contributions from WP3 and WP4 with a common CI platform; (ii) continuously
execute system-level testing to validate the interfaces between respective sub-systems; (iii) design and execute the
experiments to validate the project findings in the selected testbeds and use cases, according to the methodology described
in Section 1.2.2; (iv) provide WP2, WP3 and WP4 with feedback from the integration and validation activities to adjust
the requirements and architecture, as well as the on-going development activities; (v) verify that the project objectives
are met according to the the KPIs defined in Section 1.1.1; (vi) create portable small-scale versions of the pilots for
demonstration purposes.
In Task T5.2, Task T5.3, and Task T5.4 below, the specifications of the project use cases will be produced, accompanied
by detailed diagrams (e.g., in Unified Modelling Language (UML)) that define the roles, functionalities and outcomes in
all stages of the services offered in the project and by the definition of the final KPIs, to be validated in each respective
task.

The main goal of WP6 is to ensure that project’s results will be communicated to stakeholders and contribute to
the European vision of fostering the industrial capability in the cloud computing sector. Furthermore, WP6 will raise
awareness of the EDGELESS solution to scientific, academic and industrial communities, to show how serverless and
edge computing are becoming key enabler in the Next Generation Internet (NGI) era. The WP6 objectives are: (i) Provide
maximum visibility and public awareness of the EDGELESS solution by following a sound dissemination strategy
(Section 2.2.1). (ii) Coordinate standardisation and open source community engagements to maximise interoperability
with other leading technologies. (iii) Provide business and technical know-how to the participating partners as well as
to companies external to the consortium. (iv) Build a robust exploitation strategy for the project, on top of partners’
individual exploitation plans. (v) Identify EDGELESS tangible and intangible assets and products and map them to
actual market needs. (vi) Facilitate long-term sustainability and potential commercialisation of the EDGELESS results.
(vii) Take under consideration any policy, privacy and legal issues.