Human-Driven Edge Computing and Communication: Part 1

Abstract

The articles in this special section focus on edge computing. The vision of edge computing considers that tasks are not exclusively allocated on centralized cloud platforms, but are distributed toward the edge of the network (as in the Internet of Things and fog computing paradigms), and transferred closer to the business thanks to content delivery networks. The traditional gateway becomes a set-top box machine, with additional computation and storage capabilities, where micro-tasks can be offloaded first, instead of directly to the cloud. Mobile edge computing can also be a more suitable approach to also extract knowledge from privacy sensitive data, which are not to be transferred to third party entities (global cloud operators) for processing. The proliferation of the networking connectivity and the progressive miniaturization of the computing devices have paved the way to sensor networks and their success in the automation of several monitoring and control applications. Such networks are built in an ad hoc manner and deployed in an unsupervised manner, without an a priori design. The consequent availability of long-range communication means at certain nodes of those networks has enabled the possibility of the Internet connection of the sensor network to make use of cloud-based services.