Moving to the Edge-Cloud-of-Things: Recent Advances and Future Research Directions

Abstract

Cloud computing has significantly enhanced the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) by ensuring and supporting the Quality of Service (QoS) of IoT applications. However, cloud services are still far from IoT devices. Notably, the transmission of IoT data experiences network issues, such as high latency. In this case, the cloud platforms cannot satisfy the IoT applications that require real-time response. Yet, the location of cloud services is one of the challenges encountered in the evolution of the IoT paradigm. Recently, edge cloud computing has been proposed to bring cloud services closer to the IoT end-users, becoming a promising paradigm whose pitfalls and challenges are not yet well understood. This paper aims at presenting the leading-edge computing concerning the movement of services from centralized cloud platforms to decentralized platforms, and examines the issues and challenges introduced by these highly distributed environments, to support engineers and researchers who might benefit from this transition.