Edge Computing: Use Cases and Research Challenges

Abstract

The continuum increase of connected devices and the rise of new emergent applications with fast response times, higher privacy, and security, push the horizon to a new industrial revolution. As a result, the impact of optimizing production and product transactions manifests a fierce necessity of developing new concepts like the Industry 4.0. The combination of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices with the increasingly large-scale machine-to-machine and the Internet of Things deployments, helps manufacturers and consumers to better communication and monitoring, along with new levels of analysis, providing a truly productive future. Edge computing represents an integral part of Industry 4.0, having the purpose of enabling computational resources closer to the edge of the network. In this chapter, we describe in detail this paradigm by looking at its advantages and disadvantages as well as some representative use cases. Finally, we present and discuss the research challenges found in edge computing, mostly focusing on resource management.