Communications of the ACM
Edge Computing: The Architecture of the Future
Edge architecture is shaking up one of the original Internet of Things areas, medical devices.
Credit: Fit Studio/Shutterstock
As technology extends deeper into every aspect of business, the tip of the spear is often some device at the outer edge of the network, whether a connected industrial controller, a soil moisture sensor, a smartphone, or a security cam.
This ballooning internet of things is already collecting petabytes of data, some of it processed for analysis and some of it immediately actionable. So an architectural problem arises: You don't want to connect all those devices and stream all that data directly to some centralized cloud or company data center. The latency and data transfer costs are too high.
That's where edge computing comes in. It provides the "intermediating infrastructure and critical services between core datacenters and intelligent endpoints," as the research firm IDC puts it. In other words, edge computing provides a vital layer of compute and storage physically close to IoT endpoints, so that control devices can respond with low latency – and edge analytics processing can reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred to the core.
From Network World
View Full Article
No entries found