Given the inability of Highly-Distributed-Application developers to foresee the changes as well as the heterogeneity on the underlying infrastructure, there is a compelling case for the design and development of novel software paradigms that facilitate application developers to take advantage of the emerging programmability of the underlying infrastructure and develop Reconfigurable-by-Design applications. It is also crucial to design solutions that are scalable, support high performance, are resilient-to-failure and consider the runtime environment conditions. Towards this direction, the ARCADIA project aims to design and validate a Novel Reconfigurable-By-Design Highly Distributed Applications Development Paradigm over Programmable Infrastructure.
The proposed framework relies on an extensible Context Model, which can be used by developers directly at the source-code level. Proper Context-Model is assisted and validated by Integrated Development Environment (IDE) plugins to assure that the generated executable files contain meaningful semantics.
According to the ARCADIA's vision, the executables should be on-boarded by a Smart Controller, which undertakes the tasks of translating annotations to optimal infrastructural configuration. Such a controller enforces an optimal configuration to the registered programmable resources and pro-actively adjusts the configuration plan based on the Infrastructural State and the Application State. The Context-Model and the aforementioned ARCADIA toolset are complemented by a Development Methodology that assures that developed Highly Distributed Applications are Reconfigurable-By-Design. ARCADIA framework has been validated and evaluated on three use cases that are deployed over testbeds that host heterogeneous programmable infrastructure:
o Energy Efficiency vs Quality of Service (QoS) Trade - off: This use case shows how the ARCADIA framework can be used to design better energy-aware resource management schemes, by exploiting the application's structure and components to achieve optimal balance between performance and power consumption.
o High Performance Survivable Communications in Distributed IoT Deployments:
The goal of this use case is to introduce ARCADIA capabilities into an existing heterogeneous communications infrastructure for public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) to support survivable and application-aware usage of infrastructure and network capabilities, hence improving availability and survivability of IoT services in emergency situations.
o Security and Privacy Support in the FIWARE Platform: This use case was intended to validate a security and privacy by design approach that helps software developers implement secure and scalable applications by leveraging emerging software technologies such as Network Functions Virtualization. In addition to that, to support security and privacy requirements in a sensitive application domains, a Highly Distributed Encrypted Communication service was considered. The IoT reference architecture from FIWARE was investigated and integrated when implementing use case application.
