Cloud and Edge Computing Systems for IoT

Dear Colleagues,

We are in the midst of a rapid growth in Internet-of-Things (IoT) related multimodal applications in diverse areas such as smart cities, smart homes, autonomous vehicles, agriculture, manufacturing, and smart power grids. The rapid rise of distributed, heterogeneous, and collaborative IoT is empowered by low-cost embedded devices, on-demand, massively scalable computing in the Cloud, high-speed communication networks, and big data storage technologies and tools. Motivated by constraints on latency, bandwidth, cost, and data privacy issues, the IoT designers have been offloading resource-intensive functionalities to the emerging network infrastructure tier, i.e., edge nodes. This calls for the development of novel computation, memory, and power paradigms that support the interplay of Cloud, edge computing, and IoT devices.

With the increasing complexity of current and future IoT systems, new hardware and software systems and paradigms are urgently needed by the application programmers with limited systems-level knowledge and skills. This can allow them to rapidly develop and deploy diverse IoT applications that satisfy multiple criteria, such as functionality, performance, sustainability, and security requirements. For example, low-power embedded hardware accelerators for Deep Learning applications allow for computationally intensive AI algorithms to be run at the Edge instead of the Cloud, thus decreasing application latency, and reducing network bandwidth requirements. Similarly, a distributed software stack that spans Cloud, Edge, and IoT nodes, facilitate convenient abstractions for developing IoT applications that are required to scale to hundreds of thousands of IoT nodes over a large geographic area.

While the research community has started addressing the above described IoT systems challenges, many open research questions remain. Some of these include 1) What type of specialized hardware accelerators should be architected for IoT and Edge nodes such that power effective performance is achieved, while amortizing the development cost over a sufficiently large variety of applications? 2) What system software abstractions are required to manage the tremendous scale, and heterogeneity of IoT devices? 3) How can deep learning algorithms be modified to function efficiently within the limitations of IoT systems' available resources? 4) How can we facilitate, vendor neutral platforms that allow multi cloud operations thus allowing the use of the best-of-breed services from competing vendors, while preventing vendor lock-in? 5) How does the roll out of high speed 5G networks impact the placement and migration of computing tasks between the Edge and the Cloud? 6) How does the falling costs of high speed storage devices such as NVMe SSDs, the emergence of non-volatile memories, and new high speed interconnect standards such as CXL 2.0, impact the computing and storage stack at IoT Edge? , and 7) What are effective and efficient security and privacy capabilities that can best support diverse IoT applications and devices?

In this Special Issue on Cloud and Edge Computing Systems for IoT, we invite researchers to submit previously unpublished research that addresses the above questions and related issues.

Dr. Arun Ravindran
Dr. Reshmi Mitra
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. IoT is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• IoT
• cloud
• edge
• systems
• AI hardware accelerators
• system software
• security