Edge computing and sensor-cloud: overview, solutions, and directions

Sensor-cloud originates from extensive recent applications of wireless sensor networks and cloud computing. To draw a roadmap of the current research activities of the sensor-cloud community, we first investigate the state-of-the-art sensor-cloud literature reviews published since the late 2010s and discovered that these surveys have primarily studied the sensor-cloud in specific aspects, security-enabled solutions, efficient management mechanisms, and architectural challenges. While the existing surveys have reviewed the sensor-cloud from various perspectives, they are inadequate for the three key issues that require urgent attention in the sensor-cloud: reliability, energy, and heterogeneity. To fill this gap, we perform a thorough survey by examining the origins of the sensor-cloud and providing an in-depth and comprehensive discussion of these three key challenges. We summarize initial designs of the new edge-based schemes to address these challenges and identify several open issues and promising future research directions.