4th Workshop on Middleware for Edge Clouds & Cloudlets (MECC 2019)

held in conjunction with ACM/IFIP/USENIX ACM International Middleware Conference
UC Davis, USA, 9-13 December, 2019

IMPORTANT DATES (23:59 GMT/UTC-12)

September 7, 2019 - Paper submission (EXTENDED)
September 27, 2019 - Notification of Acceptance
October 15, 2019 - Final version (Camera ready)


The Middleware for Edge Clouds & Cloudlets (MECC) workshop aims to
address the increasing need for closer integration between the
different tiers on modern cloud computing platforms.

There is a growing trend of interactive and resource-intensive (e.g.,
compute, storage, need for big data) applications on mobile devices
today, and currently many such applications are provided using
resources on infrastructural clouds. However, it is challenging to
provide such applications using cloud resources when there is limited
connectivity. Harvesting the resources present on nearby mobile
devices and/or cloudlets is a viable solution to this problem.

Today, there is also increasing demand for middleware that offers
higher level abstractions without hampering expressiveness and
performance. However, many distributed systems today are designed for
the datacenter, and their assumptions, such as that nodes use fast
wired interconnects, no longer hold in edge environments. In
particular, edge clouds, such as those made up of only mobile devices
at the edge, use unreliable wireless links. These unreliable links
directly translate into unavailability and churn. Simultaneously,
since mobile devices have limited energy resources, heavyweight
distributed algorithms, such as coordination using a leader-based
consensus protocol, are impractical.

As an effort to offload computation from mobile devices, cloudlets
were originally envisioned as server-class hardware deployed in a
neighborhood, office building or more generally, in close physical
proximity to any scenario with a high density of users, such as at
large public events. It is now transitioning to a more lightweight
approach where the offloading is done through multiple techniques
besides the use of virtual machines, as originally proposed, and where
cloudlets can also offer connectivity support to crowd-sourced mobile
devices, i.e., edge clouds.

With this new trend in sight, there is a need to define the services
that should be offered at each tier. For example, cloudlets can
provide well-defined APIs to support multiple computation offloading
methods. Furthermore, new modular and reconfigurable architectures
have to be proposed in order to support a variety of deployment
scenarios, such as edge clouds without cloudlet support, and scenarios
with very limited access to infrastructural clouds.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- Design and performance of middleware platforms for edge clouds and cloudlets
- Mechanisms for the integration of edge clouds with cloudlets
- Security mechanisms for edge clouds including, including but not limited to, storage and computation
- Context-aware services by cloudlets
- Connectivity-as-a-service provided by cloudlets
- Novel theoretical approaches for churn tolerance
- Lightweight replication and fault-tolerance algorithms
- Distributed coordination and cooperation for edge clouds
- Lightweight computation sandboxing for edge clouds
- Novel storage systems for edge clouds, with special focus on geo-aware storage engines
- Tools for testing and benchmarking MECC
- Experimental deployments
- Novel applications for MECC
- Networking coding approaches for MECC
- P2P overlays and systems for edge clouds
- Gossip based protocols for edge clouds
- Computational frameworks for MECC
- Programming models and abstractions to manage edge to infrastructure cloud interactions
- Middleware platforms for cloud-of-clouds
- Privacy enforcing algorithms for leveraging MECC
- Trust for edge clouds and/or cloudlets
- Interoperability between mobile OSes
- Sensor fusion for MECC
- Infrastructure cloud based services for supporting MECC

WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS

Rolando Martins (University of Porto, Portugal)
Herve Paulino (University Nova of Lisbon, Portugal)
Luis Veiga (Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal)

Contacts:
rmartins@dcc.fc.up.pt
herve.paulino@fct.unl.pt
luis.veiga@inesc-id.pt

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

David Preuveneers (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
Antonio Skarmeta (Universidad de Murcia, Spain)
Paulo Ferreira (University of Oslo, Norway)
Paulo Coelho (Federal University of Uberlandia (Brazil) / University of Lugano (Switzerland))
Felix Freitag (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain)
Ruediger Kapitza (TU Braunschweig, Germany)
João Lourenço (University Nova of Lisbon, Portugal)
Evangelia Kalyvianaki (University of Cambridge, UK)
Utsav Drolia (NEC Labs America, USA)
Odorico Mendizabal (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Brazil)
Ketan Bhardwaj (Georgia Tech, USA)
Amir M. Rahmani (UC Irvine, USA and TU Wien, Austria)
Eddy Truyen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
Wolfgang Richter (Soroco, USA)
*Not final*

PUBLICITY CHAIRS

João Silva (University Nova of Lisbon, Portugal)


SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION

MECC 2019 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, including references. Short papers should either
describe work-in-progress, or should describe visions of challenges,
problems, and potential research directions in MECC. 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://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mecc19

Accepted papers will appear in companion proceedings to the Middleware
2019 proceedings, which will be available in the ACM Digital Library
before the workshop.