Invited Paper: How Future Buildings Could Redefine Distributed Computing

One of the most important challenges for the Internet of Things (IoT) is the implementation of edge computing platforms. In order to improve the response time, the confidentiality, or the energy consumption of IoT applications, part of IoT services must be operated on servers, deployed close to connected devices. This said, much remains to be done for the practical realization of this vision. What are edge servers? Where will they be deployed? These are some questions that are poorly addressed in the literature. In this paper, we propose to build an edge computing framework around new datacenter models in which computing servers are seamlessly integrated in buildings. The datacenter models we are considering have been developed around the concept of data furnace. This concept has been implemented in European cities for district heating. Our paper introduces a new processing model in which edge and distributed cloud computing are operated with the same data furnace servers. We then discuss the challenges in the utilization of this model for edge computing. Our discussion deals with urban integration, service computing frameworks and performance issues. Finally, we end with an impact analysis of our proposition on the future of cloud computing.