مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد آینده محاسبات لبه ای و رایانش لبه‌ای برای کاربردهای اینترنت اشیا – IEEE 2018

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 (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN). 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.

INTRODUCTION

The Internet is evolving rapidly toward the future “Internet of Things” (IoT), which will potentially network billions or even trillions of devices. As predicted by Ericsson Inc. [1], more than 50 billion devices will connect to Internet by the year 2025. Most of these devices will be located at the edge of Internet and could provide new applications, changing many aspects of both traditional industrial productions and our everyday living. Some devices that already appeared include Apple watches, Oculus Rift helmets [2], Google Nest [3], Fitbit sports trackers, and Google Glasses. The edge IoT devices actually can be any kind of sensors and chips with various capabilities made by different manufacturers, and many applications can be built to enable smart home, smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart buildings, and smart cities. For the current cloud computing and application infrastructure, it is very common that these large amounts of edge devices need to work closely with the application servers located at a small number of distributed large-size datacenters because most of the computation, storage, and networking resources are in these power datacenters that are owned by the Application Service Providers (ASPs) such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple.