Editorial for the Special Section on Energy-Efficient Edge Computing

Abstract

The papers in this special section focus on energy efficient edge computing. The future increase in the amount of data and workloads generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices and connected sensors will lead to the necessity to move computational nodes from the cloud data centers closer to the data source, i.e., at the edge of the cloud, for reduced latency. An edge system is composed of any computing and networking resources along the path between data sources and cloud data centers. Depending on the specific computing needs, edge computing devices can use either a wireless or a wired connection to exchange messages with the data sources. IoT devices and sensors can then exploit the hierarchical structure of the edge and cloud system to analyze the collected data and provide useful information to users in a timely manner. For example, wearable sensors could use the computing resources of the user’s smartphone, laptop, or even smart vehicle to analyze the collected data. Because a large majority of edge devices are battery operated and have limited connectivity, the energy efficiency of computation becomes critical. To this end, it is important to minimize the energy consumption of all the components of an edge system, including sensors, IoT devices, edge nodes, and network devices while guaranteeing the desired performance. For this special section we selected eight articles that cover experimental, conceptual, and theoretical contributions to energy-efficient edge computing.