TSYS School Faculty Trailblazers

Confronting Network Congestion at the Edge

As explained in research by TSYS School professor of computer science Mohamed Riduan Abid and his colleagues Salmane Douch, Khalid Zine-Dine and Driss Bouzidi of Mohammed V University, along with Driss Benhaddou of the University of Houston, increasingly stringent constraints related to bandwidth and jitter that have been imposed by novel applications (e.g., e-Health, autonomous vehicles and smart cities) are now combining with the rapidly increasing number of connected Internet of Things devices so that the core network is becoming overly congested.  To deal with this concern, edge computing is emerging as an innovative computing paradigm that leverages Cloud computing to process and cache data at the edge, thus reducing network congestion and latency.  Given this backdrop, Abid and his co-authors present, in a forthcoming issue of IEEE Access, a detailed, thorough, and well-structured assessment of edge computing and its enabling technologies.  That assessment begins with a foundational definition of edge computing, including its architecture and evolution from cloudlets to multi-access edge computing.  According to Abid, “We survey[ed] recent studies on the main cornerstones of an edge computing system, including resource management, computation offloading, data management, and network management.  Additionally, we moved on to 5G and its empowering technologies, and explored how edge computing and 5G complement each other.”  The comprehensive approach taken by Abid and his colleagues not only explores virtualization and containerization as promising hosting runtime for edge applications, it also includes the role of edge computing integration with future concerns regarding green energy and standardization, both areas of current concern around the globe.