Advances in Edge Computing: Massive Parallel Processing and Applications

Book excerpt: The rapid advance of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has resulted in the number of IoT-connected devices growing exponentially, with billions of connected devices worldwide. While this development brings with it great opportunities for many fields of science, engineering, business and everyday life, it also presents challenges such as an architectural bottleneck – with a very large number of IoT devices connected to a rather small number of servers in Cloud data centers – and the problem of data deluge. Edge computing aims to alleviate the computational burden of the IoT for the Cloud by pushing some of the computations and logics of processing from the Cloud to the Edge of the Internet. It is becoming commonplace to allocate tasks and applications such as data filtering, classification, semantic enrichment and data aggregation to this layer, but to prevent this new layer from itself becoming another bottleneck for the whole computing stack from IoT to the Cloud, the Edge computing layer needs to be capable of implementing massively parallel and distributed algorithms efficiently. This book, Advances in Edge Computing: Massive Parallel Processing and Applications, addresses these challenges in 11 chapters. Subjects covered include: Fog storage software architecture; IoT-based crowdsourcing; the industrial Internet of Things; privacy issues; smart home management in the Cloud and the Fog; and a cloud robotic solution to assist medical applications. Providing an overview of developments in the field, the book will be of interest to all those working with the Internet of Things and Edge computing.