Efficient and Resilient Edge Computing: Algorithms, Techniques and Research Opportunities

We are witnessing a huge proliferation of low-cost devices connected in the Internet of Things. Given the large amounts of data generated by these devices at the edge of the network, there is an increasing need to process them near the network edge in order to meet the strict latency requirements of IoT applications. Edge computing is a promising paradigm to improve the quality of service for such applications by filling the latency gaps between the IoT devices and the typical cloud infrastructures. While Micro Data Centers provide computing resources that are geographically distributed, careful management of these resources near the edge of the network is vital for ensuring efficient, cost-effective and resilient operation of the system while providing low-latency access for applications executing near the network edge. This tutorial provides an introduction to edge computing and introduces the notion of Micro Data Centers and illustrates the edge computing architecture. We will discuss the algorithms, techniques and design methodologies focusing on efficient and resilient resource allocation for latency-sensitive edge computing applications. Finally, we will go through open research problems in this area and discuss potential directions of future work.