Edge Computing: A Primer

Dr. Weisong Shi is a Charles H. Gershenson Distinguished Faculty Fellow and a Professor of Computer Science at Wayne State University. There he directs the Mobile and Internet Systems Laboratory, Connected and Autonomous Driving Laboratory, Intel IoT Innovators Lab, and Wayne State Data Science Initiativeand Wireless Health Initiative, investigating performance, reliability, power- and energy-efficiency, trust and privacy issues of networked computer systems and applications. He founded the Metro Detroit Workshop on Connected and Autonomous Driving (MetroCAD). Dr. Shi is one of the world leaders in the edge computing research community, and has been advocating Edge Computing (Fog Computing) since 2014, a new computing paradigm in which the computing resources are placed at the edge of the Internet, in close proximity to mobile devices, sensors, end users and the emerging Internet of Everything.
Jie Cao is Assistant Professor (Cybersecurity) in the School of Information Security & Applied Computing at Eastern Michigan University.
Dr. Quan Zhang is a Data Engineer at Salesforce. He was previously a Graduate Research Assistant at Wayne State University.

The success of the Internet of Things and rich cloud services have helped create the need for edge computing, in which data processing occurs in part at the network edge, rather than completely in the cloud.  In Edge Computing: A Primer the vision and definition of Edge computing is introduced, as well as several key techniques that enable Edge computing. Then, four applications that benefit from Edge computing are presented as case studies, ranging from smart homes and public safety to medical services, followed by a discussion of several open challenges and opportunities in Edge computing. Finally, several key tools for edge computing such as virtualization and resource management are explained.