Edge computing enabling the Internet of Things

Abstract

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), a new concept that emerged about a year ago, integrating the IT and the Telecom worlds will have a great impact on the openness of the Telecom market. Furthermore, the virtualization revolution that has enabled the Cloud computing success will benefit the Telecom domain, which in turn will be able to support the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). The main objective of MEC solution is the export of some Cloud capabilities to the user's proximity decreasing the latency, augmenting the available bandwidth and decreasing the load on the core network. On the other hand, the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of the future, has benefited from the proliferation in the mobile phones' usage. Many mobile applications have been developed to connect a world of things (wearables, home automation systems, sensors, RFID tags etc.) to the Internet. Even if it is not a complete solution for a scalable IoT architecture but the time sensitive IoT applications (e-healthcare, real time monitoring, etc.) will profit from the MEC architecture. Furthermore, IoT can extend this paradigm to other areas (e.g. Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks) with the use of Software Defined Network (SDN) orchestration to cope with the challenges hindering the IoT real deployment, as we will illustrate in this paper.