What is Edge Computing in the Internet of Things?

What is the Edge IoT

As more and more "connected" devices generate too much data, this situation will continue with the development of IoT technology and use cases in the coming years. By 2020, as many as 20 billion connected devices will generate billions of bytes of data for each user. Edge computing applications will not only include smartphones or laptops, but also connected cars, vending machines, smart wearables, surgical medical robots, and more.

The large amount of data generated by countless types of devices like this needs to be pushed to centralized clouds for retention (data management), analysis, and decision-making. Then, the analyzed data results are sent back to devices again.

This back-and-forth consumption of data is consuming a large amount of network infrastructure and cloud infrastructure resources, further increasing latency and bandwidth consumption issues, thereby affecting critical mission IoT usage.

IoT Edge Computing

Edge computing architecture can be used to optimize cloud computing systems so that data processing and analysis can be performed at the network edge closer to the data source. With this approach, data can be collected and processed near the device itself instead of being sent to the cloud or data center.

Edge computing, along with machine learning technology, lays the groundwork for agility in IoT and future communications.