The RAINBOW Vision and Key Technological Aspects:
The vision of RAINBOW is to design and develop an open and trusted fog computing platform that facilitates the deployment and management of scalable, heterogeneous and secure IoT services and cross-cloud applications (i.e., microservices). RAINBOW falls within the bigger vision of delivering a platform enabling users to remotely control the infrastructure that is running, potentially, on hundreds of edge devices (e.g., wearables), thousands of fog nodes in a factory building or flying in the sky (e.g., drones), and millions of vehicles travelling in a certain area or across Europe. RAINBOW aspires to enable fog computing to reach its true potential by providing the deployment, orchestration, network fabric and data management for scalable and secure edge applications, addressing the need to timely process the ever-increasing amount of data continuously gathered from heterogeneous IoT devices and appliances. Our solution will provide significant benefits for popular cloud platforms, fog middleware, and distributed data management engines, and will extend the open-source ecosystem by pushing intelligence to the network edge while also ensuring security and privacy primitives across the device-fog-cloud-application stack. To evaluate its wide applicability, RAINBOW will be demonstrated in various real world and demanding scenarios, such as automated manufacturing (Industry 4.0), connected vehicles and critical infrastructure surveillance with drones. These application areas are safety-critical and demanding; requiring guaranteed extra-functional properties, including real-time responsiveness, availability, data freshness, efficient data protection and management, energy-efficiency and industry-specific security standards.
RAINBOW Objectives
Objective I: Provide an open and trusted fog computing reference architecture and highly relevant industry use-cases that facilitate the design, development and orchestration of scalable, heterogeneous, secure and privacy-preserving IoT services and cross-cloud applications, incorporating technological and business requirements coming from the industry, the research and academic community.
Objective II: Provide a set of innovative mechanisms and middleware tools for IoT orchestration, data collection and decentralized analytics that guarantees network security, data protection, identity management and resource integrity. The key characteristic of the middleware will be the embedded intelligence and remote attestation mechanisms for establishing trust and QoS requirements while coping with performance and network uncertainties.
Objective III: Enable secure and efficient data storage and processing at the fog and edge layer and facilitate the extraction of high-level analytic insights by introducing novel decentralized algorithms and open APIs.
Objective IV: Prove the applicability, usability, effectiveness and value of the RAINBOW integrated framework, models and mechanisms in industrial, real-life trustworthy services, applications and standards demonstrating and stress-testing the RAINBOW artefacts, methodologies and services under pragmatic conditions against a pre-defined set of use cases.
Objective V: Ensure wide communication and scientific dissemination of the innovative RAINBOW results to the industry, research and international community, to realize exploitation and business planning of the RAINBOW design models, software kits and orchestration mechanisms, to identify end-users and potential customers, as well as to contribute specific project results to relevant open source communities.
