Time-Critical Clouds

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Abstract

In a number of time-critical societal applications, besides providing high reliability and throughput a very important property the cloud infrastructure has to provide is guaranteed low latency for delivering data. This feature is sorely lacking today, with the so-called tail-latency of slowest responses in popular cloud services being several orders of magnitude longer than the median response times. Unfortunately, simply using a network infrastructure with ample bandwidth does not guarantee low latency because of problems with congestion at the intra-and inter-data center level, sub-optimal routing, server overload, etc. All of these problems render the existing cloud infrastructures unsuitable for time-critical societal applications.

In cooperation with the automotive and telecommunications industries, we will conduct fundamental research with the aim to develop the necessary technology for time-critical cloud services. Based on in-depth studies of delays in networks and cloud services, we will develop autonomic solutions for time-critical data transmission, which will be evaluated on the test case in intelligent transport systems. We hope that our insights and research findings will guide the technical development of future automated industrial applications.

Duration: 2016-2021

Funding: 27 million SEK, provided by SSF (the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research) .

This is a joint effort of the NSLAB at KTH Royal Institute of Technology with the Decisions, Networks and Analytics (DNA) Laboratory  of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) .