During the first year of the project, requirements describing the functional scope of the desired SmartEdge toolset were defined based on the use cases and the project's internal expert knowledge. The requirements were collected in six different categories around Swarm Management, Swarm Communication, IDM and Policy & Security, Application Lifecycle, Hardware and Protocols, Continuous Semantic Integration and Low Code Programming. Based on each use case, use case partners were asked to identify their requirements for SmartEdge (making sure to differ between pure use case requirements and requirements to be met by SmartEdge). Stakeholders were also defined, i.e. the people who may interact with, use, or contribute to SmartEdge.
In addition, Use Cases scenarios were defined and execution plans were carried out. For each use case, detailed technical overviews, encompassing potential demonstration scenarios, outlining feasible functionalities, and specifying necessary supporting details of technical overviews were carried out.
Finally, the initial architecture for the SmartEdge project was outlined. Various implementation options were analysed considering Use Case scenarios and Smartedge toolset requirements.
The final architectural design considered many fundamental concepts of the SmartEdge design, such as “what is a swarm”, “can swarms have heterogeneous members”, and “is it possible to be part of two swarms at the same time”. These concepts were applied to the use cases to see if they met their functional requirements.
On going work in the second year focuses on developing all the necessary tools for Continuous Semantic Integration (CSI) concept as well as implementing the Dynamic Swarm Networking concept. This includes hardware-accelerated in-network operations for context-aware networking and automatic resource discovery.
