By analyzing the keywords of edge computation-related papers published in mainstream academic institutions such as IEEE/ACM/USENIX, we can get the statistical results shown in Figure 1-9. It can be seen that in the research work of edge computing, the Internet of Things, computing offloading, resource allocation, 5G, and deep learning are the top five keywords. This also basically covers the research trends and recent advances in edge computing.

Figure 1-9 Relative word frequency of keywords in edge computing-related articles in the last 5 years

D685A1156U01 01 Internet of Things + Edge Computing

The Internet of Things has become the first hot word in edge computing related research papers, reflecting the close relationship between edge computing and the Internet of Things. The more mature the development of Internet of Things technology, the stronger the technical demand for edge computing. The key to the combination of the two lies in two aspects:

On the one hand, there is a need to address how iot devices can access edge computing in a low-cost way;

On the other hand, it is also necessary to solve how edge computing can cope with the D685A1156U01 characteristics of massive, heterogeneous and dynamic Internet of Things services.

02 5G+ Edge computing

The development of 5G technology will enable communication latency to reach a level lower than computing latency, which will make many existing computing models fundamentally change, but also lead to more and more computing load from front-end mobile devices to edge computing servers.

This puts forward new requirements and challenges for the architecture of edge computing, and it is necessary to make important improvements on the basis of the existing cloud computing cluster architecture to meet the needs of 5G mobile services with high real-time, data-intensive, high mobility, and heterogeneous dynamics.

03 Virtualization Technology

Due to the heterogeneity of front-end devices, the computing requests served by edge computing are also highly heterogeneous. This requires the edge server to be able to run a variety of computing services flexibly. Virtualization technology is one of the mainstream directions to solve this problem, through different systems, different environments and even different hardware network functions on the common computing resources to achieve flexible management of network functions.

Compared with the virtualization technology D685A1156U01 in traditional cloud computing, the virtualization technology of edge computing has higher latency requirements. Not only that, edge servers also have much less computing resources than cloud servers, making virtualization technology as lightweight as possible.

04 Computing Uninstallation

Computing offload is one of the classic problems in cloud computing, and it is also a very important core problem in edge computing.

Computing offloading in edge computing refers to the transfer of computing tasks from the front-end device to the edge server, and then the edge server returns the computing results to the front-end device or delivers them to the cloud server as required. Research in this direction has focused on answering a few key core questions – whether to uninstall, which tasks to uninstall, to which server, and how to uninstall.

Compared with task unloading in cloud computing, an important feature of edge computing is the transmission mode of front-end devices and the selection of edge servers, which will seriously affect the performance of computing unloading.