Guest Editorial: Introduction to the Special Section on Edge Computing for Internet of Things

Abstract

The papers in this special section focus on edge computing for Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT is expected to improve the quality of human lives through billions of Internet-based devices that connect the physical and digital worlds. To satisfy the computation and storage requirements of IoT, cloud computing has served as the most important computing infrastructure. However, with the explosion of the number of devices in IoT and the resulting a large volume of raw data continuously generated by IoT devices, cloud computing has significant challenges to efficiently an efficiently and securely handle the data volume. In particular, cloud computing is limited in terms of network bandwidth, security and privacy protection in IoT. To address these challenges, many researchers have attempted to move data computation and service provisioning from the cloud to the edge, which results in the area of edge computing. Early-stage research has indicated that edge computing could potentially enable IoT applications to meet their latency/delay requirements, improve the scalability and energy efficiency of IoT systems, and facilitate contextual information processing. Nevertheless, a series of challenging problems needs to be addressed in order to fully utilize edge computing for IoT.