Edge-Computing Architectures for Internet of Things Applications: A Survey

Abstract

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications and their interference with our daily life tasks have led to a large number of IoT devices and enormous sizes of IoT-generated data. The resources of IoT devices are limited; therefore, the processing and storing IoT data in these devices are inefficient. Traditional cloud-computing resources are used to partially handle some of the IoT resource-limitation issues; however, using the resources in cloud centers leads to other issues, such as latency in time-critical IoT applications. Therefore, edge-cloud-computing technology has recently evolved. This technology allows for data processing and storage at the edge of the network. This paper studies, in-depth, edge-computing architectures for IoT (ECAs-IoT), and then classifies them according to different factors such as data placement, orchestration services, security, and big data. Besides, the paper studies each architecture in depth and compares them according to various features. Additionally, ECAs-IoT is mapped according to two existing IoT layered models, which helps in identifying the capabilities, features, and gaps of every architecture. Moreover, the paper presents the most important limitations of existing ECAs-IoT and recommends solutions to them. Furthermore, this survey details the IoT applications in the edge-computing domain. Lastly, the paper recommends four different scenarios for using ECAs-IoT by IoT applications.