Meeting the Requirements of Internet of Things: The Promise of Edge Computing

Over the last few decades, Internet of Things (IoT) has become the spotlight area of research within the Industries and Academics. Primarily, IoT devices are characterized by small and nonscalable resources, including low processing capabilities, less internal memory, and short battery life. However, IoT applications demand extensive storage and faster response to ensure seamless and interoperable communication. Hence, Edge Computing and data/task offloading among the edge or cloud servers become promising, while also posing critical research challenges for edge-enabled large-scale IoT ecosystems. Several research activities have addressed the difficulties of determining an efficient and scalable data offloading strategy utilizing edge and cloud computing-supported technologies. This article focuses on the state-of-the-art edge IoT data offloading techniques, and optimization models in the heterogeneous IoT environment. We examine how edge and cloud-supported technologies can handle delay-sensitive IoT applications efficiently. Moreover, we introduce an IoT-based healthcare use case scenario to explain edge data execution and resource provisioning in IoT networks. Finally, we discuss several challenging issues and possible solutions to establish interoperable communication and computation for IoT applications.

I. Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) comprises an ever-increasing number of physical things connecting to the Internet at an unprecedented rate [1]. IoT is being widely used in intelligent transportation, innovative healthcare, industrial operations, smart agriculture, waste management, smart cities, and many more applications [2]. IoT technology can transform both living and nonliving entities available on the Earth’s surface into smart object and connected them by advanced technologies, such as high-speed communication links, gateways, edge, and cloud [3]. Resource-constrained and smart IoT devices can run the applications locally which require minimal computation by exchanging information and coordinating decisions among themselves. Otherwise, the IoT devices need to offload their computational data to remote computing servers like edge servers or cloud data centers (CDCs) to achieve Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements.