European Projects: NECOS

The NECOS project addresses relevant limitations of current cloud computing infrastructures to respond to the new services demands, as presented in two use-cases that are instantiated in a set of six scenarios. The first use-case is telco service provider focused and is oriented towards the adoption of cloud computing in large networks. The second use-case is targeting the use of edge clouds to support devices with limited computation and storage capacity. The envisaged solution is based on a new concept – Lightweight Slice Defined Cloud (LSDC) – as an approach that extends the virtualization to all the resources in the participating networks and data centers, providing uniform management with advanced levels of orchestration.

The NECOS approach is manifested in a newly developed platform whose main distinguishing features are:

• The Slice as a Service as new deployment model. A slice is a grouping of resources managed as a whole, which can accommodate service components, independent of other slices.
• Embedded algorithms for an optimal allocation of resources to slices in the cloud and networking infrastructure to respond to the dynamic changes of the various service demands.
• A management and orchestration approach making use of artificial intelligence techniques in order to tackle the complexity of large-scale virtualized infrastructure environments.
• Making reality the lightweight principle in terms of small footprint components deployable on a large number of small network and cloud devices at the edges of the network.