Going Back to the Roots—The Evolution of Edge Computing, An IoT Perspective

When the requirements and processing appetites have grown enough in the era of personal computing, users began to think about cloud servers. This initiated the growth of cloud computing and set up the era of Everything-as-a-Service. When the IoT idea spread, lots of sensors and smaller devices were introduced for the realization of the ubiquitous and pervasive computing. The simplest way to collect and process all this data was to connect the devices to the cloud. This required high-speed networks and interconnections. However, no matter how fast they could go, engineers understood that theres no need to transfer all the data through links to the central data server, and a more efficient organization would be to distribute smaller servers in front of the central data server and closer to the user location. This began the evolution of pushing data collection and processing back to end-user devices, as a new computing approach called edge computing, which appears in different forms such as fog computing, cloudlets, and mobile edge computing.