INCT 2014: on the Internet of the Future

Abstract

During the last decade, the Internet made radical transformations in the ways humans communicate possible. At the beginning of me 21st Century, the internet has been both refined and expanded, thereby impacting the lives of a large part of the world population. Recently, with the popularization of the cloud computing and mobile computing technologies and the increasing use of sensor networks and big data technology, an infinity of novel possibilities are emerging. This convergence of technologies, allied to the necessities and concerns related to the future digital applications, have led researchers 10 propose new approaches of scientific and technological investigation to enable the development of the future internet. The future internet will result from the convergence of mobile computing with cloud computing, integrating large-scale systems constructed from the composition of thousands of distributed services, running on a large amount of physical and virtual machines, and managing large quantities of multimedia data generated from various sources while interacting directly with the physical world via sensors and actuators of the internet of things. This Future Internet will be the key element that will enable the realization of the smart cities vision, in which urban infrastructure will be used to its fullest extent in order to offer a better quality of life for its inhabitants. The smart city the future will make use mobile phones and other personal devices, together with sensors and embedded systems in the physical infrastructure of the city, all interconnected via the Internet. In a decentralized but coordinated way, all this cyberinfrastructure will offer support for the optimized management of the city. The software platforms of the smart city will contribute not only to the daily life of the cities, but also to the long-term planning and conception of public policies. In order to tackle the scientific and technological challenges and offer innovative solutions to the problems of the future internet and smart cities, the proposed institute will develop scientific and technological research, teaching and diffusion and extension activities, international collaboration covering the different layers that make up the Internet. We will collaborate with the development of the Future Internet and contribute to the achievement of the smart cities, with special focus on the urban mobility problems in Brazilian cities. The research will address the basic infrastructure, middleware, and services and applications of the future internet, and will be divided into three fundamental lines of research: (1) networks and high-performance distributed computing (2) software engineering for the future internet and (3) analysis and mathematical modeling for the future internet and smart cities. The scientific and technological results of the INCT will be validated through applications in smart cities: there will be a main reference application in the context of urban mobility and transport, while three other simpler applications (in the areas of accessibility, health and arts) will assist in the generalization of the results. The research will be conducted by a team of high-level scientists from 12 Brazilian institutions from academia, industry and government that have already a history of successful collaboration and possess the necessary abilities for the production of knowledge with potential of great impact in science and society. The INCT will generate innovative open source software that may be used by governments, businesses and researchers, publications in top-tier vehicles, high-level human resources, international scientific collaborations, university education and training of people from companies and government, scientific dissemination to society in general and technology transfer, both for large companies and for startups. (AU)