Future Edge Cloud and Edge Computing for Internet of Things Applications

TLDR

The Internet is rapidly evolving toward an IoT that will connect billions of edge devices generating massive high‑speed data, but centralized cloud infrastructure faces latency and scalability challenges, making edge cloud and edge computing—enabled by NFV and SDN—a promising solution to bring resources closer to resource‑poor devices. This survey investigates the rationale, state‑of‑the‑art efforts, enabling technologies, research topics, and application areas of edge cloud and edge computing, aiming to provide a comprehensive overview of current research and future directions. The authors conduct a survey of the rationale, state‑of‑the‑art efforts, enabling technologies, research topics, and typical IoT applications related to edge cloud and edge computing.

Abstract

The Internet is evolving rapidly toward the future Internet of Things (IoT) which will potentially connect billions or even trillions of edge devices which could generate huge amount of data at a very high speed and some of the applications may require very low latency. The traditional cloud infrastructure will run into a series of difficulties due to centralized computation, storage, and networking in a small number of datacenters, and due to the relative long distance between the edge devices and the remote datacenters. To tackle this challenge, edge cloud and edge computing seem to be a promising possibility which provides resources closer to the resource-poor edge IoT devices and potentially can nurture a new IoT innovation ecosystem. Such prospect is enabled by a series of emerging technologies, including network function virtualization and software defined networking. In this survey paper, we investigate the key rationale, the state-of-the-art efforts, the key enabling technologies and research topics, and typical IoT applications benefiting from edge cloud. We aim to draw an overall picture of both ongoing research efforts and future possible research directions through comprehensive discussions.