TriCloudEdge: A multi-layer Cloud Continuum

TriCloudEdge is a scalable three-tier cloud continuum that integrates far-edge devices, intermediate edge nodes, and central cloud services, working in parallel as a unified solution. At the far edge, ultra-low-cost microcontrollers can handle lightweight AI tasks, while intermediate edge devices provide local intelligence, and the cloud tier offers large-scale analytics, federated learning, model adaptation, and global identity management. The proposed architecture enables multi-protocols and technologies (WebSocket, MQTT, HTTP) compared to a versatile protocol (Zenoh) to transfer diverse bidirectional data across the tiers, offering a balance between computational challenges and latency requirements. Comparative implementations between these two architectures demonstrate the trade-offs between resource utilization and communication efficiency. The results show that TriCloudEdge can distribute computational challenges to address latency and privacy concerns. The work also presents tests of AI model adaptation on the far edge and the computational effort challenges under the prism of parallelism. This work offers a perspective on the practical continuum challenges of implementation aligned with recent research advances addressing challenges across the different cloud levels.