co-located with ACM Middleware 2025 in Nashville, USA
The growing trend of cloud computing adoption is being driven by the pursuit of reducing upfront costs with hardware and staff, which is further accentuated with the on-the-fly adjustment of the computational needs through its natural resource elasticity. The increasing pervasiveness of cloud computing is being supported by just a handful of vendors, such as Amazon, Alibaba, Baidu, Google and Microsoft, which creates the perfect conditions for cartelization of these services. At the same time, ongoing efforts are trying to leverage these facilities with edge computing, where computation is performed, at least partially, nearer to the data sources, sensors and user's devices, in a concerted effort to reduce latency and the amount of data transfer to the cloud. The use of these solutions is driven by the rising popularity of IoT devices and cyber physical systems, where a large number of sensors and actuators are contributing to the computing continuum and highlighting challenges related to the robustness, and independence of edge sites.
The increasing adoption of both cloud and edge computing is being driven by classical architectures which are based on well-known centralized models to manage the life cycle of hard and software resources. The introduction of geo-distributed or decentralized clouds can offer an alternative to established commercial providers, allowing for a democratization of access to computation while acting as a reinforcement to self-sovereign, namely in the EU. Moreover, as shown in recent large-scale events, such as the current COVID-19 outburst, centralized infrastructures pose a significant threat to the sustainability of our societal fabric by targeting our economy, security, and personal freedoms.
To overcome these limitations, the MiddleWEdge workshop aims to address the decentralization of computation and storage. By offering novel models and mechanisms to ensure efficient, safe, secure and frugal management of compute, data and communications - leveraging the latest achievements in network communications. This will enable the research community and industry to bootstrap the edge computing paradigm and offer concrete solutions to the market. There are multiple challenges that are considered to be core to MiddleWEdge, namely:
- Management of the resource life cycle: The management of the resources should be revisited to decentralized approaches. More precisely, we expect that edge resources will be managed by multiple independent entities, each one in charge of controlling one part of the edge infrastructures, delivering this way independence, as well as autonomy of the resources. It is noteworthy that the management of the life cycle relies on various mechanisms including monitoring of resources, controller loops, deployment/reconfiguration techniques that should be explored;
- Scheduling: Exploring novel paths to make scheduling and service placement fully decentralized, able to seamlessly leverage devices with heterogeneous architectures and capabilities, in an efficient and scalable manner. This entails employing self-organizing algorithms continuously running, matching requests and resources preferably locally (while aiming to converge towards global balancing).; The use of reinforcement techniques can be relevant to predict future usages of the infrastructures, as well as the evolution of the needs of applications, providing important hints for the scheduling decisions, with the goal of optimising different objectives (efficiency, energy, etc.);
- Latency-sensitive systems: Low latencies connections and decentralized servers are currently showcasing a new potential for latency-sensitive systems. Particularly, urgent analytics aim to identify extreme events and accelerate response by triggering appropriate reactions. Developing urgent analytics requires developers and service providers to orchestrate data-driven workflows while considering the extreme heterogeneity of systems, but also the uncertainty arising from the availability of data. Thus, the end-to-end performance of these applications deployed across the continuum depends on programming abstractions that react at runtime to unforeseen events, and adaptation of the resources and computing paths between the edge and the cloud.
Paper submission, Oct 9th, 2025
Notification, Oct 24th, 2025
Camera Ready, Oct 27th, 2025
Submission page: Submission Link
This will be the third edition of the workshop following the last iteration at Middleware’23. The proceedings of MiddleWEdge 2022 and of MiddleWEdge 2023 are both available online. An opening speech from the organizers will be followed by a keynote. The workshop will welcome both full and short papers (for demos and posters). Ending with an invited panel followed by a breakout session on new directions and applications for decentralized clouds (dependent on the number of accepted papers).
Submitted manuscripts should be structured as technical papers and may not exceed:
The page limits include all the content, including bibliography, appendix, etc.
Submitted papers must adhere to the formatting instructions of the ACM SIGPLAN style, which can be found on the ACM template page. The font size has to be set to 10pt.
Submissions can be made at the following link: Submission Link