The GEO-Cloud Experiment: Global Earth Observation System Computed in Cloud

Abstract

Earth Observation (EO) is considered a key element in the European Research Roadmap and an opportunity market for the next years. However, this field presents some critical challenges to cover the current demand of services: i) there is massive and large-sized data from Earth Observation recordings, ii) On demand storage, processing and distribution of geo-information generated with the recorded data are required. Conventional infrastructures have the risks of over/under size the infrastructure when big data is used, they are not flexible to cover sudden changes in the demand of services and the access to the information presents large latencies. These aspects limit the use of EO technology for real time use. The use of cloud computing technology can overcome the previously defined limitations. The GEO-Cloud experiment emerged to find viable solutions to provide highly demanding EO services by using future internet technologies. It is a close to reality experiment, part of the FP7 Fed4FIRE project. GEO-Cloud consists of the design, implementation and testing in cloud a complete EO system, from the acquisition of geo-data with a constellation of satellites to its on demand distribution to end users with remote access. This paper presents the GEO-Cloud experiment design, architecture and foreseen research activity.