Green and Sustainable Cloud of Things: Enabling Collaborative Edge Computing

The proliferation of IoTs beside the emergence of various cloud services push the horizon of edge computing. By offering cloud capabilities at the network edge closer to mobile devices, edge computing is a promising paradigm to resolve several vital challenges in IoTs, such as bandwidth saturation, energy constraints, low latency transmission, and data security and privacy. To provide a comprehensive understanding of edge computing supported by the integration of IoTs and cloud computing, that is, CoTs, this article first discusses some distinct research directions in CoTs with respect to edge computing. Given the significance of energy efficiency and sustainability of edge deployment in CoTs, we put forward a green and sustainable virtual network embedding framework for cooperative edge computing in wireless-optical broadband access networks. Specifically, we leverage a reliability function to confirm the number of backup edge devices, and embed virtual networks onto the suitable edge devices in CoTs. Finally, several research challenges and open issues are discussed.