The EU project LightKone aims to develop a scientifically sound and industrially validated model for doing general-purpose computation on edge networks. An edge network consists of a large set of heterogeneous, loosely coupled computing nodes situated at the logical extreme of a network. Common examples are community networks and Internet of Things networks, and networks including mobile devices, personal computers, and points of presence including Mobile Edge Computing. Internet applications are increasingly running on edge networks, to reduce latency, increase scalability, resilience, and security, and permit local decision making.

Large-scale on-line services including social networks and multiplayer games handle huge quantities of frequently changing shared data. Maintaining its consistency is relatively simple in a centralised cloud, but no longer possible due to increased scalability requirements. Instead, data must be replicated across several distributed data centres, requiring new principled approaches to consistency that will be explored by the SyncFree project.