Verifiable and elastic end-to-end communication infrastructures for private professional environments Scientific goals:

Private professional environments such as manufacturing industry, warehouses, hospitals, airports, etc. increasingly rely on end-to-end connected solutions to support and improve their operational performance. Think of collaborative robots, augmented reality, real-time collaboration, sensing systems, accurate localization, industrial closed control loops, etc. These often impose quite diverse and stringent requirements that must be satisfied by the underlying communication infrastructure, which consists of both wireless and wired network segments. Today, all involved actors exist in isolation, leading to several key problems. Applications are blind to the networks they run on. They are not able to measure and verify the end-to-end quality or get feedback on the achievable quality.

In turn, various network segments offer a one-size-fits-all solution, with limited customization capabilities, and are unaware of the actual application requirements. Different segments in an endto-end connection operate as isolated islands, rendering end-to-end guarantees impossible. Lastly, for demanding applications, a dedicated network for a single application is deployed as a way to meet requirements, thereby wasting capacity, increasing cost, and limiting future use cases.

VERI-END.com will build future verifiable and elastic end-to-end communication solutions for private professional environments, i.e. extremely programmable, fully-shared, converged wiredwireless networking environments that can simultaneously support very diverse traffic types with challenging demands in terms of latency, reliability and/or throughput, in a measurable way. For this, novel monitoring points and in-band telemetry will turn both the network and end devices into an intelligent source of telemetry information for end-to-end verification. Advanced programmable flow control mechanisms that can work across different wired and wireless network segments - thereby also bringing time-sensitivity to wireless networks - will make communication both flexible and deterministic. Lastly, by means of network-aware application design and an application-aware SDN controller, VERI-END.com will close the loop, linking application needs and network configurability to achieve automated application-driven customization of the end-to-end shared network infrastructure.

The project will deliver a toolbox with software components for monitoring, flow control, application design and management, where both general purpose and dedicated wired and wireless network hardware and end devices will be targeted. In line with this, three sample prototyping environments will be set up in lab to validate the designed mechanisms and get insights in various trade-offs (hard versus soft time-sensitive networking, in-band monitoring and reporting strategies, real-time versus control plane load, etc.). The setups will be used to prove that VERI-END.com outperforms baseline SotA technologies in terms of verifiable and configurable determinism in an end-to-end fashion, thereby considering various use cases from the targeted markets.