Introduction

The shape of the Internet has changed significantly in recent years with the advent of mobile devices and increasingly powerful fixed devices deployed at the edge of the network. Each intelligent device is pushing a small amount of data to the Internet, and these small amounts multiplied by billions of devices aggregate to become big data. The traditional infrastructure, based on the cloud model, cannot scale to handle the new demand of the Internet of Things (IoT). Particularly, energy efficiency is the key driver in this new era. This chapter summarizes the development of the Internet and discusses the new challenges that it faces. The UniServer project funded by the European Commission under its Horizon Programme carried out research in the field from 2016-2019 publishing a number of significant papers in the area. The chapter explains the basis of the UniServer architecture and points to the chapters that follow incorporating the significant details of the research.