Data Storage at the Edge: Challenges and Opportunities

Edge systems are envisioned to provide storage and compute infrastructure at interoperating edge nodes located near the user. An edge node is orders-of-magnitude smaller than its datacenter counterpart in terms of power, network connectivity, and available compute resources. These differences have dramatic effects on the applicability of fundamental storage-related algorithms in edge settings. This article introduces the emerging edge architecture to the information theory community. We focus primarily on the applications and components of edge storage systems that are of interest to this community, on the challenges that stem from their limitations and constraints, and on the opportunities that arise from their special use cases.