The increasing adoption of both cloud and edge computing is being driven by classical architectures which are based on well-known centralized models to manage the life cycle of hard and software resources. The introduction of geo-distributed or decentralized clouds can offer an alternative to established commercial providers, allowing for a democratization of access to computation while acting as a reinforcement to self-sovereign, namely in the EU. Moreover, as shown in recent large-scale events, such as the current COVID-19 outburst, centralized infrastructures pose a significant threat to the sustainability of our societal fabric by targeting our economy, security, and personal freedoms.
To overcome these limitations, the MiddleWedge workshop aims to address the decentralization and democratization of computation and storage. By offering novel models and mechanisms to ensure secure, efficient and safety management of computation, data and communications, the research community and industry can bootstrap the edge computing paradigm and offer concrete solutions to the market. There are multiple challenges that are considered to be core to MiddleWedge, namely:
- Identity and Access Management: Explore decentralized management, authentication and authorization as a way to remove centralized solutions, as it would become a single-point of failure forcing all nodes to trust this specific third party. Using concepts introduced by self-sovereignty solutions, such as Sovrin, to provide decentralized identifiers, e.g., personas or aliases, to provide privacy to the end users. Moreover, there is a need for novel solutions that support decentralized authorization and access control. The problem of current solutions is that they store metadata and ACLs with the network overlay, and thus forcing delegation;
- Management of the resource life cycle: Similarly to the IAM challenges, the management of the resources should be revisited to decentralized approaches. More precisely, we expect that edge resources will be managed by multiple independent entities, each one in charge of controlling one part of the edge infrastructures, delivering this way independence, as well as autonomy of the resources. It is noteworthy that the management of the life cycle relies on various mechanisms including monitoring of resources, controller loops, deployment/reconfiguration techniques that should be explored;
- Scheduling: Exploring novel paths to make scheduling and service placement fully decentralized, able to seamlessly leverage devices with heterogeneous architectures and capabilities, in an efficient and scalable manner. This entails employing self-organizing algorithms continuously running, matching requests and resources preferably locally (while aiming to converge towards global balancing).; The use of reinforcement techniques can be relevant to predict future usages of the infrastructures, as well as the evolution of the needs of applications, providing important hints for the scheduling decisions, with the goal of optimising different objectives (efficiency, energy, etc.);
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
All accepted papers will appear in a Middleware 2022 companion proceedings, which will be available in the ACM Digital Library prior to the workshop.
At least one of the authors will have to register for the workshop and present the paper.
Authors should also acknowledge the following disclaimer by the ACM: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)
MiddleWedge will receive proposals for communication in the form of full research papers of at most 6 pages, and short research papers of at most 3 pages, excluding references. Short papers should either describe work-in-progress, or should describe visions of challenges, problems, and potential research directions in Edge computing. Content should be work that is not previously published or concurrently submitted elsewhere.
All submissions should be in PDF and must follow the ACM template. Submissions must have authors information, text, figures, references and appendices (if applicable). Submissions that do not respect the formatting requirement may be rejected without review.
Reviewing is single-blind. This means that the names and affiliations of the authors must appear in the submitted papers. Each paper will receive at least three reviews from members of the program committee.
Submissions should be done through HotCRP at the following URL: https://middlewedge22.hotcrp.com/
General and Technical Program Co-Chairs
The main email for MiddleWedge:
The program co-chairs can be contacted using the following emails: