Cloud versus Edge: Who Serves the Internet-of-Things Better?

Abstract

Usually announced to the ICT community as rivals in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) context, cloud and edge could work together according to their respective capabilities. Today’s IoT applications cannot be dependent on a single technology (either SQL or noSQL) nor a single operation model (either centralized or decentralized). The challenges are multiple including complexity of user scenarios, multiplicity of things, sensitivity of data, etc. This paper raises the question of who serves IoT better? Cloud, only; edge, only; or both together. To answer this question, clouds’ and edges’ duties are identified and then a set of collaborative scenarios are discussed with respect to these duties