The research work of CHARITY is organized in four research Work Packages (WP1-4), in addition to one Work Package (WP5) for dissemination and impact creation, and another (WP6) for project management.
The project work has been started with the definition of the reference scenarios and the refinement of the seven project use cases which are (a) Real-time Holographic Applications, b) Immersive Virtual Training and c) Mixed Reality Interactive Applications). Their technical as well as some general-purpose requirements have been identified and these were used to design and derive the technical specifications of the CHARITY architecture. The architecture has been designed after a thorough investigation of most relevant standards and specifications as well as different relevant architectures defined in other EU consortia. The results were documented in D1.2 and D1.3.
WP2 investigated tools and algorithms aiming at the creation of an efficient end-to-end orchestration framework that manages the creation and lifecycle management of multiple XR services over the cloud/edge continuum. For this purpose, relevant tools and algorithms have been investigated. An AI based resource-aware orchestration framework has been proposed. To ensure acceptable XR service provisioning, work on proactive prediction of QoS has been done. Several traffic routing mechanisms have been explored that can support extremely interactive, bandwidth intensive and latency sensitive end-to-end networking. Moreover, security and privacy concerns of each CHARITY use case have been analysed, and several solutions and open-source tools that can ensure the security of the Charity platform have been investigated. Work has also started to provide for the XR application developer the needed tools and instruments allowing them to exploit the capabilities developed by CHARITY.
WP3 has been investigating solutions to efficiently exploit network and computing resources (e.g. Multi/Many core CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs on edge devices, network-aware data caching/storage) and 2) how to make the application adaptive (e.g. adaptive/contextualized rendering). An initial monitoring framework based on the open-source technology Prometheus has been proposed. WP3 has been also working towards the design of the CHARITY Edge Storage Component (CHES) along with its basic functionalities, namely data storage, retrieval tasks, security and privacy protection capabilities, QoE insurance and mitigation. A first implementation is close to be released. WP3 has been also looking into solutions that make XR services resilient to fluctuations in network resources.
Discussions have been started regarding which mechanisms and components are going to be developed and their relationship with the CHARITY framework. Partners were asked to identify the components and interfaces that they will develop. In D4.1 we documented the initial mapping between components, CHARITY architecture, responsible partners and additional involved partners. Aspects related to integration, namely, the design and development of a single testbed versus multiple testbeds at partners premises have been discussed too, and how the specific components and concepts will be integrated and showcased.
CHARITY has also established a communication strategy and related procedures. A project website has been established, various information material has been created and the social media presence was setup. In terms of exploitation and innovation management, CHARITY investigated the multiple market domains targeted by XR services and applications, focusing in particular on the areas interested by the use cases that will be implemented and evaluated within the project, which are the most natural and best candidates to exploit the project results. Finally, CHARITY analysed the standardization bodies in scope of the project and linked them to the CHARITY architecture components so as to adopt these standards and/or further develop them, whenever needed.
