ABSTRACT
In today’s era of technological advances, connecting devices from anywhere and at any time is an absolute necessity. The evolution of the internet to enable billions and trillions of edge devices to be connected with higher reliability and lower latency has led to the development of the internet of things (IoT). The cloud computing paradigm has a significant contribution to make in enhancing the IoT, providing quality of service (QoS); however, the cloud platform is not efficient enough to satisfy real-time delay-tolerant IoT applications. To circumvent this shortcoming, cloud computing edge devices are designed to locate IoT end users closer to cloud servers. Cloud-edge architecture is a promising mechanism for providing not only delay-tolerant services but also energy efficiency and better resource allocation. Cloud-edge infrastructure provides a decentralized mechanism rather than centralized cloud platforms for reliable and efficient communication by IoT devices. This chapter provides a brief overview of the cloud-edge concept and its evolution, background, capabilities and applications, as well as cloud-edge architecture for IoT applications. Issues and challenges are examined, together with use cases, real-time applications and trends in future research interest.
