Edge Computing and Networking: A Survey on Infrastructures and Applications

As a concept to enhance and extend cloud-computing capabilities, edge computing aims to provide Internet-based services in the close proximity to users by placing IT infrastructures at the network edge in forms of tiny datacenters. Taking advantage of the close distance to end user and access networks, edge datacenters can provide low-latency and context-aware services and further improve users’ quality of experience. As the network edge is a geographically spread concept, the edge datacenters are usually highly distributed so that they can provide nearby storage and processing capabilities to most of the end users. Furthermore, edge datacenters also co-work with centralized cloud datacenters for service orchestration. Such decentralization and collaboration are expected to introduce significant transformations to both infrastructures and applications. To provide an overview of how edge can be integrated with cloud-computing and how edge computing can benefit applications, this paper studies the infrastructure and application issues of edge computing and networking in several sub-aspects, including related concepts, infrastructures, resource management and virtualization, performance, and applications.