Toward Dispersed Computing: Cases and State-of-The-Art

With the growth of IoT and latency-sensitive applications (e.g., virtual reality, autonomous driving), massive amounts of data are generated at the network and the edge. Such proliferation drives the development of dispersed computing as a promising complementary paradigm to cloud computing and edge computing. Dispersed computing can leverage in-network computing resources to provide lower latency guarantees and more reliable computing power support than the cloud computing. On the other hand, dispersed computing shows excellent performance in highly dynamic and heterogeneous environments. This paper introduces the concepts of dispersed computing and demonstrates the potential of dispersed computing in terms of providing low-latency services and adapting to highly dynamic and heterogeneous environments through several cases. To better grasp the current state of research in dispersed computing, several major research directions and advances are also presented in the hope of attracting the attention of the community and inspiring more researches to promote the implementation of dispersed computing.