Special Issue on Real-Time Computing in the IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud Continuum, ACM TECS

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (ACM TECS)
Special Issue on Real-Time Computing in the IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud Continuum

Link: https://dl.acm.org/pb-assets/static_journal_pages/tecs/pdf/TECS-SI-Real-Time-Computing-1652724584890.pdf

Guest Editors:

• Daniel Casini, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy, daniel.casini@santannapisa.it
• Dakshina Dasari, Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany, dakshina.dasari@de.bosch.com
• Matthias Becker, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, mabecker@kth.se
• Giorgio Buttazzo, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy, giorgio.buttazzo@santannapisa.it

The edge computing paradigm is becoming increasingly popular as it facilitates real-time computation, reduces energy consumption and carbon footprint, and fosters security and privacy preservation by processing the data closer to its origin, thereby drastically reducing the amount of data sent to the cloud. However, some computations still need to occur in the cloud, thus connecting the IoT, the edge, and the cloud and originating the so-called IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud Compute Continuum. Many edge applications tightly interact with the surrounding
environment and are required to deliver a result (e.g., perform actuation or send a message through a 5G network) within a well-defined deadline. Therefore, a key requirement in edge computing is the need to ensure predictability when communicating across the IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud Compute Continuum while also efficiently utilizing the system resources.
However, meeting the above requirements is non-trivial. Modern edge devices can be very diverse, ranging from hand-held devices to large in-premise servers, and can include complex embedded platforms with multiple heterogeneous cores and hardware accelerators such as GPUs, TPUs, and FPGAs. Secondly, the network transmission time (TSN over Ethernet to 5G links) can lead to variability in the end-to-end latencies incurred by edge applications. Timing guarantees must also be provided for the involved middlewares, virtualization technologies, and communication protocols to ensure meeting end-to-end requirements for applications deployed across the compute continuum.
When connected to the cloud, massively distributed applications must be managed by orchestrators capable of allocating workloads on a vast realm of heterogeneous resources, each characterized by a diverse computing capacity and processing capability. Consequently, the IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud Compute Continuum needs to be empowered with new algorithms to guarantee real-time constraints and monitoring mechanisms and provide dynamic load balancing and adaptation while accounting for the heterogeneous nature of computing platforms
and communication latencies over the network.
This special issue will solicit regular papers from an open call as well as extended versions of best-selected papers from the 1st International Workshop on Real-time And intelliGent Edge computing (RAGE) 2022, see https://rage2022.github.io/. Invited speakers of RAGE 2022 will also be invited to submit a contribution related to their talk. The standard peer-review process of ACM TECS will be followed in all cases.

Topics
All submissions must address real-time requirements in the edge computing domain to be in scope in the special issue. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Temporal isolation in light-weight virtualization mechanisms (Docker, WebAssembly) for serverless edge computing
• Real-time scheduling policies for containers in edge virtualized systems
• End-to-end latency analysis in the IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud Compute Continuum
• Methods for timing-aware functional decomposition between the edge and cloud
• Timing guarantees for communication protocols and middlewares for edge computing (e.g., DDS, Zenoh, MQTT, ROS 2, and more)
• Timing and resource-aware orchestration for the IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud Compute Continuum
• Real-time edge computing industrial use cases, best practices, and experience reports

Important Dates
• Submissions deadline: October 10, 2022.
• First-round review decisions: December 10, 2022.
• Deadline for revision submissions: February 4, 2023.
• Notification of final decisions: April 4, 2023.
• Tentative publication: Spring/Summer, 2023.

Submission Information
Prospective authors are invited to submit their manuscripts electronically adhering to the ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems guidelines (https://tecs.acm.org/authors.cfm). Please submit your papers through the online system (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tecs) and be sure to select the “Special Issue on Real-Time Computing in the IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud Continuum” option for the paper-type. Please indicate that you are submitting to the Special Issue on Real-Time Computing in the IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud Continuum in the author’s
cover letter. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere.
Extended versions of conference papers (including RAGE 2022) must include at least 30% new research-based technical content, and be less than 50% verbatim similarity as reported by a tool (such as CrossRef).
The cover letter should clearly state which are the key new contributions with respect to the previous version, and the title of the extended journal version should be different from the title of the published conference version.

For questions and further information, please contact Daniel Casini (daniel.casini@santannapisa.it).