# The Cloud-to-Edge-to-IoT Continuum as an Enabler for Search and Rescue Operations
## 4 Nephele Project as Enabler for SAR Operations
### Nephele's Added Value  
The implementation of the described use case will demonstrate several benefits obtained with the NEPHELE innovation and research activities. Most importantly, they will help in coping with the identified challenges for the SAR operations and take important steps in meeting the overall high-level goal of improving situational awareness for first responders in cases of natural or human disasters. The benefits deriving from the solutions proposed in NEPHELE can be summarized in the following points. 1. **Reduced delay in time-critical missions**: by exploiting compute and storage resources at the edge of the networks, with the possibility of the dynamic adaptation of the application components deployment over the continuum, lower delays will be expected for computationally demanding tasks on a large amount of data. This will be of high importance as it will strongly enhance first responders' effectiveness and security in their operations;
2. **Efficient data management**: a large amount of data available and collected by sensors, drones and robots will be filtered, compressed and analyzed by exploiting supportive functions made available by the VOStack in NEPHELE. Only a subset of the produced data will be stored for future reuse based on data importance. This will reduce the bandwidth needed for communications from the incident area to the applications layers that introduce intelligence into the application and by this reduce the delay in communication and the risk of starvation in terms of networking resources;
3. **Robot fleet management and trajectory optimization**: exploiting the IoT-to-edge-to-cloud compute continuum, smart decisions will be taken and advanced algorithms will be provided for optimal robot and drone trajectory planning in multi-robot environments. Solutions will rely on AI techniques able to learn from what fleets robots see in their environment and enable semantic navigation with time-optimized trajectories;
4. **Rescue operations prioritization**: AI techniques and optimization algorithms can elaborate the high amount of data and information collected from the intervention area to support rescue teams in giving priorities to the intervention tasks. The compute continuum will enable computationally heavy and complex decisions in a dynamic environment where risk prediction and assessment, victims' health monitoring and victim identification may produce new information continuously and new decisions should be triggered;5. **HW-agnostic deployment**: the introduction of the VO concept and the multilevel meta-orchestration open for device-independent deployment and bootstrapping using generic HW. Different software components of an HDA can be deployed at every level of the IoT-to-edge-to-cloud continuum, which reduces the HW requirements (e.g., in computation and storage) at the IoT level for enabling a given application;
6. **AI for computer vision and image processing**: advanced AI algorithms can be deployed as part of the supportive functions made available through the VOSstack innovation from NEPHELE. These can then be enabled on demand and deployed over the compute continuum for image and analysis and computer vision to locate and identify victims and perform risk assessments and predictions;
7. **End-to-end security**: IoT devices and HDA users will benefit from the security and authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) functionalities offered by the NEPHELE framework. These functions will be offered as support functions for the VOs representing the IoT devices and will help in controlling access to the services, authorization, enforcing policies and identifying users and devices;
8. **Optimal network resource orchestration**: based on the HDA requirements, an optimized network resource allocation policy will be enforced over the IoT-to-edge-to-cloud continuum. Here, the experience in network slicing and software-defined networking (SDN) will be exploited to be able to support time-critical applications such as the SAR operations presented in this paper.