MECC 2019

Call for Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS

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

held in conjunction with ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2019)

UC Davis, CA, USA, December 9-13, 2019

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

September 2, 2019 - Paper submission September 27, 2019 - Notification of Acceptance October 15, 2019 - Final version 

Easychair Paper Submission: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mecc19

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.