Research challenges related to Open source and digital sovereignty in the Cloud/Edge/IoT Continuum
• Digital sovereignty, allowing Europe to maintain control over its digital infrastructure, services, and data, should be a primordial principle in developing a European Cloud-Edge-IoT continuum.
• This control ensures privacy, security, promotes innovation and economic growth, and supports the development of technologies and services tailored to European needs and democratic values.
• The Cloud-Edge-IoT continuum is currently shifting towards hyper-distributed computing, leveraging automation for optimal resource management across devices and computing models. Over the past four decades, open source and open standards, with their inherent distributed and resilient characteristics, have demonstrated their pivotal role in fostering the development and efficient and resilient operation of the Internet (including cloud, edge, and IoT).
• In other words, Open source and open standards are key to the Cloud-Edge-IoT continuum development, promoting collaboration, accelerating adoption, ensuring interoperability, reducing costs, and fostering a more inclusive and innovative ecosystem.
• Despite the software engineering challenges and potential fragmentation of standards in open- source projects, these issues can be addressed through collaboration, widely adopted open standards, rigorous testing, and the establishment of striving open-source businesses and communities.
Research challenges in the cloud-edge-IoT continuum
• Interoperability: Create open standard protocols and interfaces for seamless communication and data exchange between different devices, systems, and platforms.
• Security, Privacy and Data Sovereignty: Ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive data during processing and transfer.
• Edge Intelligence: Developing hardware, algorithms, and models to enable intelligent decision-making at the edge.
• Efficiency: Efficient resource management and orchestration to support dynamic adaptation and automation.
• Scalability and Heterogeneity: Scalable architectures, languages, frameworks, and platforms that can accommodate the diversity of devices, data formats, and protocols.
• Open Standards and Open Source: The development of open standards and open-source languages, frameworks and platforms can help promote interoperability, innovation, competition, digital sovereignty, and privacy.
• Usability, Accessibility and Personalization: Key challenge lies in developing user-friendly interfaces and experiences to ensure easy interaction with the system and personalized experiences catering to individual user needs and preferences.
• Trust and Transparency: Enable users to understand how their data is being used and control its use, to guarantee trust and transparency in the system. Develop ethical frameworks to guide the design and use of the system considering privacy, security, and fairness.
• Data Portability: Data and technology heterogeneity, security, interoperability, privacy, scalability, and standardisation.
• Co-creation: Participatory design processes that enable users and businesses to contribute to the system's development.