A Survey Paper on Edge Computing - Fog
Computing,Mobile Edge Computing,Cloudlets
Sai Hima Varsha Vatsavai
Department of Computer Science
VCU, Virginia, USA
Vatsavaishv@vcu.edu
Abstract—Cloud computing has been a promising
solution for storage, computing and analysis of complex data
for quite some time. The rapid boom of Internet of Things
(IOT) devices and technologies, pose problems like high
latency and low efficiency for time sensitive and location
specific cloud applications/services, which need careful
consideration during design. This leads us to look at
alternative design paradigms like FOG computing, multi-
access edge computing and cloudlets, some of which seem to
be promising down the line. In this paper, we shall discuss
about the major alternative in the field of edge computing
like Fog Computing, Cloudlets etc. We would also study the
architecture, principles and implementation of edge
computing technologies. In the later part of the paper, we
will investigate the security and privacy issues related to the
edge-computing platform and its effects on system
performance. Towards the end, we shall discuss about the
challenges and the research work being currently in
progress on these technologies. Finally, we will conclude by
discussing what can be achieved with current edge
computing platforms and how emerging technologies would
handle the ever-increasing complexity of data and
computing devices. This paper provides a complete insight
that would be necessary in the field of edge computing.
Keywords— Edge computing, Fog Computing, Cloudlets,
DCNs, Internet of Things
I. INTRODUCTION
The Computational and Storage world has become very
large and complex. Cloud is an emerging technology in the
field of information technology. It is a scenario where in which
computing resources are offered as a service. It usually relies
on sharing a physical or virtual resource rather than relying on
personal hardware or software. Many businesses are moving
towards cloud to reduce their storage costs and to improve the
performance. When it comes to the matter of storage and
computation of large scales of data, cloud computing is the
better solution. It has significant potential to improve the
deployment and administration of services through efficient
resource sharing and rapid scalability.
The demand for cloud computing is increasing extensively
with the increase in data and devices. Along with this data
complexity, there is a massive growth in intelligent and mobile
devices coupled with technologies like Internet of Things,
Augmented Reality etc. This demanded in gaining real-time
responses quicker and support context-awareness and mobility.
Hence, by looking into the available information it becomes
obvious that the main backbone of Cloud Computing is a data
center which handles storage and processing of data. The
current paradigm of cloud computing architecture is to have
datacenters – capable of handling, storing and processing of
massive amounts of data. Usually these data centers are
connected to each other over WAN or Optical networks to
form data center networks (DCNs) [6]. These DCNs appear as
a single resource to the end user. They are usually suitable for
low latency communication. However, with the advancement
in technology, data and Internet of Things (IOT) systems, they
have demonstrated a new set of requirements to the existing
cloud-based solutions. As it becomes increasingly difficult to
manage the size and speed with which data is generated in
today’s digital age, cloud computing can help us in building the
next generation of digital solutions.
Especially with the substantial increase in IOT in the last
few years there has been a lot of demand for decreasing the
time latency and to improve efficiency. Also, the amount of
data generated by sensors, actuators and other devices in the
Internet of Things (IoT) has increased noticeably in the last few
years [12]. Generally, IoT data are processed in the cloud,
mostly through computing resources located in distant data
centers. Consequently, network bandwidth and communication
latency has become one of the serious problems. So, it is made
clear that even though the DCNs are suitable for low latency
communication, the latency of communication between the
end/edge devices and the DCNs must be monitored. Also, there
is a need for mobility support due to the agile nature of the end
devices in several applications due to the advancement in
present day technologies. There are also several works which
show the increase in connected devices in near future.
There is a research which is conducted to estimate the
number of connected devices in future. It states that the number
of connected devices would reach to around 30-50 billion by
2020 [26]. Hence, this rate of increase would cause massive
scale of network traffic towards DCNs and connected devices
which is a bottleneck degrading the latency and Quality of
Service and Quality of Experience. The other factor is, with the
increase in requests to DCN leads to its operation at high duty
cycle. This effects the environment also due to the emission of
harmful greenhouse gases.
The Edge Computing technology seem to overcome all the
above-mentioned challenges faced in Cloud Computing
environment. Edge computing appears to tackle the challenges
and difficulties caused due to centralized computation, storage,
and networking in small datacenters, and due to the long-
distance communication between the edge devices and the
remote datacenters. It appears to be the promising solution
which provides cloud resources closer to the resource-poor
edge devices.
According to Edge Computing, the computing resources
are made available at the end of the network, close to (or even
co-located with) end-devices. By placing the computing
resources in such proximity to the devices reduces
communication latency. Furthermore, the data can be
processed and analyzed just one hop away from end-devices,
which reduces the bandwidth demands on network links to
distant data centers. So, we can say that with the presence of
these “Edge Devices”, the computational load at the data
centers is reduced drastically by handling or processing some
requests locally which do not require intervention from the
cloud. This reduces latency in resolving requests and handles
requests effectively. Finally, with all the knowledge we have
we can say that edge computing platforms support mobility of
devices and distributed applications. IoT deployments are also
benefited from edge computing.
Figure 1: Architecture of Edge Computing
The Edge Layer between the end devices and the Cloud are
implemented in different ways based upon the communication
protocols, networks used, and services offered by it. It is
implemented in three ways namely Mobile Edge Computing
(MEC), Fog Computing (FC), and Cloudlet Computing (CC).
The objective of the paper is to provide the survey, challenges
and opportunities in edge computing.
II. MOTIVATION
Using Cloud as the centralized server increases the number
of requests between users such as smartphones, tablets,
wearables and gadgets, whom we refer as edge devices, and
CDNs. This results in the increase in real time response.
Hence, there is a need to look ‘beyond the clouds’ towards the
edge of the network. Hence, the paper [26] identified few
necessities that made us look for edge computing which are
listed as follows:
• To Decentralize Cloud
Centralized computing is not always the best idea for
applications which are distributed. It’s always better when
computing is done closer to the DCNs. So, it would always be
a better option to move the computing to edge servers.
Decentralizing cloud is beneficial to improve the performance
of system.
• To Overcome the resource Limitation of End devices.
Front-end devices like smart phones, desktops have
relatively less hardware to perform complex computations. So,
the data usually is sent to cloud to perform any sort of
computation. It is not always a good practice to send all the
data to cloud not knowing which is required for any
computation. So, if the data is utilized in the edge servers
instead of Cloud, this idea would always be better.
• Dealing with Energy Consumption.
With the increasing demand of cloud computing many
applications are moving to cloud platforms. This demand
results in large energy consumption at the centralized cloud.
So, with the diversified data centers this energy the
applications also get distributed to reduce energy
consumption.
• Dealing with Network Traffic.
Volume of data generated in today’s world is increasing
drastically. In-order to handle the incoming request to the
cloud there must be a concrete solution. Edge computing
handles network traffic effectively.
• Smart Computation Techniques.
Data generated at the user end needs to be sent to the cloud
server to perform any computation. There is a chance to
improve the computational performance if the data is sent to
nearby edge servers rather than sending to a distant cloud.
III. RELATED SURVEY
There are several other existing related studies in Edge
Computing Technology area that have attempted to provide a
survey of the papers in the field of Fog Computing, MEC and
Cloudlets. As discusses earlier, it is implemented in three
ways which we are going to discuss in the coming sections.
Fog computing presents M2M gateways and wireless
routers as a computing layer between the actual cloud which
are called Fog Computing Nodes (FCNs). They store and
compute data from end devices locally before transmitting it to
the actual distant cloud. Coming to MEC, it proposes the
deployment of intermediate nodes with storage and computing
capabilities in base stations of cellular networks. With this
proposal it offers cloud computing capabilities inside the
Radio Area Network [6]. On the other hand, Cloudlets are like
datacenters but on a lower scale near end users. This idea
allows end devices to perform their computation at the
cloudlet itself which acts as a resource similar to that of data • “Fog computing is a scenario where a huge number
center. of heterogeneous (wireless and sometimes
The authors in [27] present a comprehensive review of autonomous) ubiquitous and decentralized devices
current literature in Cloud computing with a focus on communicate and potentially cooperate among them
architectures, opportunities and challenges of cloud system. and with the network to perform storage and
The authors in [6] gives us the better understanding by processing tasks without the intervention of third
comparing all the three existing edge computing parties. These tasks can be for supporting basic
implementations. They concentrated in discussing about the network functions or new services and applications
parameters which are to be considered for better that run in a sandboxed environment. Users leasing
implementation of the edge computing. part of their devices to host these services get
The authors in [12] have discussed about the how incentives for doing so.” [4]
beneficial it is to bring the concept of computing closer to the
end users. The paper talked about the key IoT application
scenarios that benefit from edge computing and demonstrated • “Fog computing is a distributed computing platform
several experimental results which prove that edge computing where most of the processing will be done by
is necessary to achieve satisfactory improvement in the virtualized and non-virtualized end or edge devices.
performance. It is also associated with the cloud for non-latency-
The paper [18] discussed about the implementation of fog aware processing and long-term storage of useful
computing and about present security and privacy issues data by residing in between users and the cloud.” [2]
entitled with the architecture. Though fog computing resolves
many issues related to traditional cloud computing there are
many threats to the present architecture which are to be
addressed. The authors of the paper [19] have identified
twelve critical security issues and suggested possible solutions
which are discussed in the later part of the paper.
The paper [8] clearly explained about the architecture and
the current trends in the field of mobile edge computing. There
are number of surveys in the field of MEC which we have use
in this article. The paper [22] spoke about the cloudlet
technologies. It introduced Cloudlet mesh to secure the mobile
clouds from intrusions and attacks.
IV. IMPLEMENTATIONS
In this section, we will be discussing about the
implementation of the three edge computing technologies. We
critically examine the different implementations and compare
the features of these implementation. We would discuss about
the function and location of their nodes which serve as the
intermediate layer between the end devices and the actual
cloud, their target end devices and about their services offered
in coming subsections.
A. Fog Computing
There are various definitions for fog computing. We
already know that fog computing is a distributed computing
implementation where processing or computations are done at
the edge of the network with the integration of the actual cloud
Figure 2: Edge Technologies
through fog nodes. But, according to the authors of the paper
[2] fog computing is defined in various ways. Some of the
examples mentioned in this paper are as follows: Fog Computing extends Cloud Computing to the edge of
network, wireless networks for IOT applications. Fog
• “Fog computing is a highly virtualized platform that computing offers strong support for Internet of Things by
provides compute, storage, and networking services decentralizing the cloud environment and by distributing the
between IoT devices and traditional cloud computing computing and application services in most efficient way from
data centers, typically, but not exclusively located at the data source to the cloud. As lower amount of data is
the edge of network.” [2] transported to the cloud for processing, analysis and storage,
this implementation is highly efficient. The implementation of
fog computing is mainly based on the Fog Computing Nodes
(FCNs) which are placed between the end devices and cloud.
The FCNs are based on different kinds of elements like
routers, switches, access points, IOT gateways, set-top boxes
etc. The characteristics are well explained in this paper [5].
Characteristics of fog computing:
• Fog computing nodes are located at the network edge
and far away from actual cloud.
• They enable low latency.
• They are accessed over wireless network.
• Can support mobility of device and IoT.
• Support for on-line analytics with the cloud.
• Real-time interactions and Scalable.
Figure 3: Fog Computing architecture
Architecture of fog computing:
With the benefits of fog computing, we assume to have
a standard architecture. But, there is no standard architecture Components of Fog Computing architecture:
available till date. However, many research works have been The paper [2] well explained the components of fog
done in the field of fog computing. computing architecture consisting of several layers which are
The authors in this paper [3] well explained about the divided into groups depending on a functionality.
architecture of fog computing. According to this paper, According to this paper[5], the physical and virtualization
architecture is nothing but arrangement of physical and logical layer involves different types of nodes such as physical nodes,
network elements, hardware, and software to implement a virtual nodes and virtual sensor networks. While at the
useful network. The key architectural decisions mainly monitoring layer, resource utilization, the availability of
involve how the fog nodes are placed and the protocols, sensors and fog nodes and network elements are monitored.
topology, bandwidth capacities of links between the fog The pre-processing layer performs data management tasks.
nodes, devices and the actual cloud. It also involves the The pre-processed data are then stored temporarily in the
hardware and software of fog nodes. In order to optimize the temporary storage layer. In the security layer, the
efficiency and performance of fog nodes, one must understand encryption/decryption of data comes into play. Finally, in the
the critical requirements that will be using fog and specific transport layer, the pre-processed data are uploaded to the
software applications. Because, based on this study only the cloud to allow the cloud to extract and create more useful
requirements are mapped to a particular fog node. There will services.
also be certain requirements which are difficult to study or
implement and move to fog-based architectures as they are
heavily reliable on cloud. So, understanding these
requirements allows us to effectively implement and meet the
requirements of applications.
High-Level Architecture of Fog Computing:
This architecture comprises of three layers namely cloud
plane, fog plane, IoT plane which are represented in the below
figure as cloud, fog and infrastructure .
The most important layer is the Fog layer.It consists of
various computing devices mainy Fog Computing nodes
(FCNs). The problem to handle comple data is well solved by
handling the data at edge level. This FCNs are capable of
performing small and medium scale big-data processing.
The bottommost layer is Iot plane or infrastructure which
consists of all connected devices. For the time-sensitive
applications the processing has to be done in these FCNs, in
the fog plane and the other processing which is not time-
sensitive is done in the distant cloud. This fog layer usually
manages this requirement. It decides on which data to send to
coud and what should not be sent. With this implementation
the user is able to use the services of both fog and cloud based
upon the request. But, the complex processing and storage Figure 4: Components of Fog Computing
requirements are handled by distant cloud.
B. Mobile Edge Computing
Recent trend in smartphones or tablet computers has a
diverse effect on mobile and wireless networks [7]. Mobile
networks have low storage capacity, high energy consumption,
low bandwidth and high latency. Growth in IoT led to the
increase in mobile networks in many ways. The main purpose
of MEC is to deal with the challenges from MCC. This
provides the end-user with faster complex computing, energy
efficiency, storage capacity, mobility when compared to the
computation in distant cloud.
Mobile edge computing is well defined in this paper [6], as
an implementation of Edge computing to bring complex
computations and storage to the edge of the network to reduce
latency and to improve context awareness. According to the
authors of [7], MEC is a convincible architecture where in
which cloud computing services are usually moved to the edge
of networks leveraging mobile base stations. This
implementation can be use in mobile, wireless and wireline
scenarios, which uses software and hardware platforms
located at the edge closer to the end users.
According to the paper [8], MEC is defined as:
• “Mobile edge computing provides an IT service
environment and cloud computing capabilities at the
edge of the mobile network, within the radio access
network (RAN) and in close proximity to mobile
subscribers.”
According to this theory, MEC offers cloud computing
capabilities within RAN. This network reduces the traffic
between main cloud and the end user, by connecting the end
user directly to the edge network. With the help of this we can
improve our computational speed, avoiding bottlenecks and
system failure.
The characteristics of MEC are well explained in this
paper [9].
Figure 5: MEC architecture
Characteristics of MEC:
• On-premises: MEC platforms can run isolated from
rest of the network while accessing the local
resources.
• Proximity: MEC has the advantage to analyze big
data over normal computing technologies as it is
deployed close to end users.
• Lower Latency: As MEC services are closer to user
devices, we can achieve low latency due to less
traffic.
• Location Awareness: MEC usually receives
information from edge devices within the LAN to
know the location of the devices. This is one of the
important features of mobile networking
Architecture of MEC:
To know the architecture of MEC this paper [8], tells us
the importance to learn about the cellular network
communication as MEC is usually found within RAN.
Role of RAN in Cellular Networks:
RAN is part of the cellular network communication system
infrastructure which acts as a connection between mobile
phones or any wireless machine with mobile core network
(actual network for data processing).
Similar to Fog Computing architecture, MEC architectures
is also classified into three layers. According to this paper
[10], MEC is a layer between the cloud and mobile devices. It
is an infrastructure where the data storage and processing
occur outside the end-user, in the edge devices.
According to the paper [6], MEC can be defined as the
implementation of edge computing which brings the complex
computations and storage capacities to the edge of the network
within RAN to reduce latency and to improve performance
and context awareness.
C. Cloudlets
In the paper [11], Proposed by Carnegie Mellon
University, cloudlet computing is another direction in mobile
computing that shares many traits with Mobile Cloud
Computing (MCC) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). It
deals with the disadvantages of MCC proposing a better
solution to improve the performance of the applications.
Various definitions of Cloudlets according to this paper
are:
• “A cloudlet is a trusted resource-rich computer or a
cluster of computers with strong connection to the
Internet that is utilized by nearby mobile devices”
[11]
• “A Cloudlet can be treated as “data center in a box”
running a virtual machine capable of provisioning
resources to end-devices and users in real time over
a WLAN network” [6]
Architecture of Cloudlets:
Cloudlet is the middle tier of a 3-tier architecture
according to [6] [11]. cloudlets are nothing but a small cloud
close to mobile devices, which provide one-hop access to the
services with high bandwidth and low latency. The
architecture for Cloudlets is based on three layers, the
component layer, the node layer and the cloudlet layer [6].
Cloudlet technology has been introduced to deploy mobile
cloud services, but it was inadequate because of the limited
WIFI coverage. So as the computationally intensive tasks are
offloaded from the mobile devices, cloudlets can efficiently
perform computation reducing latency.
Figure 6: Cloudlets architecture
Various other papers also involved in the study of
cloudlets. They mentioned cloudlets as a small-box data center
which are deployed at one hop away from mobile devices,
such as public places, office building etc. [12]. Several units of
multicore computers form a cloudlet, connecting the end user
and the distant cloud. Cloudlet is mainly brought as a solution
to overcome the latency, energy consumption due to the
distant network by utilizing the connectivity to closer edge
data centers. It basically utilizes technologies like WIFI
located one hop or multiple hops away at the edge of the
internet. Therefore, this makes us aware that cloudlets are
dependent on robust and uninterrupted internet connection.
This internet dependency will rise to several other issues like
security and privacy threats.
V. ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES
The edge computing platforms which are described in the
previous sections, can be achieved by a few enabling
technologies [12]. A related and detailed survey on enabling
technologies of edge computing is provided in [23]. There are
certain things which are important and can be used at edge
nodes. In this section, we will be discussing about some of the
important enabling technologies which are discussed in paper
[23].
• Cloud Computing, VMs and Containers
Cloud Computing offers various deployment
model like private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud,
community cloud and various service models like
IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), PaaS (Platform as a
service), SaaS (Software as a service). We can say
that cloud computing is currently in its mature phase.
Hypervisor can run and create virtual machines that
run tasks. We can say that VM is an abstraction of a
physical hardware and requires additional libraries
for hosting applications and services. Coming to the
containers, they partition the resources of the
physical machines by creating a multiple isolated
user-space not like VMs. We came up with Docker
which is the most significant container solution
facilitating edge computing technology.
• Network Function Virtualization (NFV)
It is a technology that allows operators to
function by separating network services and
functions from hardware. This allows operators to
function on software thereby increasing the speed and
performance.
The NFV architecture defines the following
domains:
1)VFNs, which are nothing but software
implementation versions of network functions.
2)NFV infrastructure (NFVI) which comprises of
hardware and software components creating a
network environment where VNFs are deployed.
3)NFV Management and Orchestration (NFV
MANO) which organizes and manages the physical
and virtual resources.
• Software Defined Networks (SDN)
SDN is a technology which allows the multi-
tenancy support. It helps in reducing the congestion
in the core network by focusing on network
programmability, efficient resource sharing and real-
time network control.
• Network Slicing
Network slicing is the technology which allows to
support businesses with different service
requirements in the better way. It mainly slices the
network into many instances making it compatible
for a specific requirement or application or service. In
other words, we can say that network slicing gives us
a multi-tenant environment which supports resource
sharing with the help of network slice broker
improving the performance and efficiency of the
system. This service requires coordination between
NFV and SDN technologies.
VI. EDGE COMPUTING FOR IOT APPLICATIONS
IoT is the main reason for digitalization of the today’s
world. It comprises of resource-constrained devices like
sensors, smartphones, wearable device etc. [12]. Several
features enable IoT devices to be able to be deployed in edge
computing platforms rather than the distant cloud. The current
state of the art in the IoT largely involves device driven
communications and does not require explicit human
intervention.
As IoT has become a part of our lives, there is a rapid
growth in data produced and services requested by them [11].
IoT generates massive amount of data. It becomes very
complex to transfer data to the cloud for computation. So, in
order to handle such data complexity, it is always better to addresses all these issues. Mobile operators host smaller
move the computation to edge devices rather than the distant servers at the premises of their base stations which brings the
cloud. storage and processing closer to the users.
A. Fog Computing for IoT
Fog computing bridges the gap between the cloud and
IoT devices by enabling computing, storage, networking, and
data management on the network nodes within the close
vicinity of IoT devices [11]. Hence with this technology the
data computation is done between the transformation of data
from end-users to the Cloud.
According to the paper [5], To increase the efficiency of
IoT applications, most of the data generated by these IoT
devices must be processed and analyzed in real-time. Fog
computing will bring cloud networking, computing and
storage capabilities down to the edge of the network, which
will address the real-time issue of IoT devices and provide
secure and efficient IoT applications [13].
Fog computing is considered to be the best practice for
applications with low latency requirements such as video
streaming, gaming, augmented reality, etc., according to this
paper. The integration of fog computing with the IoT will
bring many benefits to various IoT applications.
Other related papers have focused on the security and
privacy issues also, which we will be discussed in further Figure 8: Applications of MEC in IoT
sections. Potential applications for MEC-enabled IoT include smart
mobility, connected vehicles, emergency response, smart
cities, content distribution and location-based services. After
looking into the idea of MEC we can say that, it is the best
alternative solution for a movable edge device.
C. Clodlets for IoT
We already discussed about how the usage of number of
mobile devices is increasing. These devices are connected to
the internet and sending huge amount of data to the cloud
which increases bandwidth and results in high latency. [15].
To address this issue Cloudlets have come into picture.
Cloudlets are nothing much a micro-cloud closer to the end
users.

Figure 7: Applications of Fog Computing in IoT

B. Mobile Edge Computing for IoT
The paper [14], explains how IoT is welcoming MEC
capabilities, improving the performance and capabilities. So,
we are extending the already existing works in various other
implementations to overcome the concerns like scalability,
privacy and security threats. Hence a new architecture of IoT
is proposed to overcome the cited challenges.
Cloud platforms are mostly not suitable for applications
Figure 9: Applications of Cloudlets in IoT
which involved low latency requirements, low responsive
time, high performance and high quality of service. MEC
 Cloudlets usually provides its services to the users closer • Spam: Spam results in unwanted usage of data,
to LANs. Cloudlets are nothing, but virtual machines which resources and energy.
are in one-hop proximity to the user devices. They provide • Jamming: attacker might generate large amounts of
mobility, scalability and elasticity to many of the user fake data to jam a transmission channel.
applications. • Denial of service: attackers might flood the fog
server with fake requests making it unavailable to the
The paper [15], concluded saying that this implementation actual users.
of the cloudlets is one of the best practices in edge computing. • Collusion: Two or more attackers collude to
In this ideology the user requests the service from the distant strengthen and to degrade the performance of cloud.
cloud through cloudlets. With this kind of implementation, we • Insecure Interfaces: Relying on insecure interfaces
can say that the users will obtain the requested services from and APIs lead to security issues. If we understand the
the cloud in less time compared to the situation where there is security model of cloud provider and the dependency
no cloudlet and where the computation has to be done directly chain associated with API, we can avoid such
in the distant cloud. The main limitation of user devices is the incidents.
energy consumption. This issue can be handled by cloudlet as • Cookie poisoning: This involves unauthorized access
cloudlet is connected to the cloud and it allows faster response to the application by changing the contents of the
to the service requests to or from the cloud and thus limiting cookie. We can erase data in the cookie or encrypt
the energy consumption. The cloudlet technology is thus used the data involved in the cookie to avoid the issue.
in various fields like education, crowd management, banking Which user wants his data to be available to all the other
and business and E-health systems. users. Cloud offers data storage, that means users data is
VII. SECURITY AND PRIVACY THREATS available in cloud. Cloud providers must make sure that the
user’s data is private and secure. Privacy is also one of the
Now a days many businesses are moving to cloud most important criteria to consider. We have user’s privacy
computing for efficient storage management and to improve divided into four aspects namely Identity privacy, Data
efficiency. In order to handle the traffic to the distant cloud, privacy, Usage privacy, Location privacy.
the idea of edge computing has come into picture. In this paper [11], the author not only tried to address
Edge computing moves the complex computations to the various threats effecting fog computing but also suggested
edge of the user devices instead of the main cloud server. With various solutions and protocols to improve current available
this demand for cloud, security and privacy threats are also protocols.
increasing. Security and privacy threats are the main According to this paper [19], Cloud security alliance have
limitations to edge computing implementation. identified twelve critical security issues and suggested
Though many researches and cloud providers are working possible solutions. Let us look into some of the issues.
on it to avoid such attacks, but these incidents keep on
happening. Many incidents on AWS, Dropbox, Drive etc.
Possible
prove that cloud computing is not immune to security and Attack Category Possible Threats
Solutions
privacy threats. Security is one of the most difficult tasks to Multi factor
implement in edge computing technology. Virtualization Hypervisor attacks, privilege Authentication,
issue Escalation attacks Control mode
access
A. Security and Privacy issues in Fog Computing Antivirus
protection,
The paper [18], also clearly discussed about the security Web Security Foreign session attack,
Intrusion
issues Hijacking
issues in fog computing. It mentions that cloud is vulnerable to Prevention
many security threats because of its computing framework and System.
Encrypted
centralized data storage. It draws the idea that since fog Internal or
Insecure APIs, Inefficient Communication
inherits many features from cloud, it inherits risks also. Communication
policies or multifactor
Issues
Let us discuss about the few threats in fog computing Authentication
implementation which are discussed in this paper: Anti-malware
Malware Virus, malware functions, functions,
• Abuse of cloud computing: Cloud computing is a functions trojan Rigorous data
week entity. The misuse of cloud technology can be backup
avoided by strictly validating and registering the Wireless security Distortion issues, data loss, Communication
actual users of the cloud. issues data breach, sniffing attacks key
• Forgery: Attackers try to imitate their identity to Policy
access other information which results in Data Security
Data replication, Data enforcement
performance degradation due to fake data sets. altering, Data erasing security,
related issues
attacks architecture
• Tampering: To affect the performance attackers encryption.
might modify the data that is being transmitted.
TABLE I. THREATS AND SOLUTIONS

Figure 10: Threats in Fog Computing
B. Security and Privacy issues in Mobile Edge Computing
In the era of mobile technology many applications are
moving towards MEC to improve their performance by
transferring the complex computations at the MEC nodes
distancing the main cloud. MEC has come to the picture with
applications in video analytics, big data analytics etc.
The paper [7], has provided with all the details of security
concerns and necessary solutions to avoid such incidents. The
three main aspects which are to be considered while dealing
with security and privacy threats in MEC architecture are:
Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.
• Network security is very important element in
Mobile Computing. It becomes very difficult to
mitigate the attack as the data has to be transmitted
from user and cloud and this transmission layer has to
be secured.
• Core network security is again the important aspect
to considered. Edge devices usually exchange
information and bypass the central cloud security
mechanism. Hence, MEC is prone to attacks.
• In MEC server security, there may be attacks which
hijack the whole data center. Design flaws,
Configuration errors, Insufficient security
managements might be the reasons to such attacks.
• It is important to have proper end devices. Improper
selection of end devices might result in the damage in
the performance of whole system.
Hence, to address all these issues, security measures are
important [7]. Authentication is one of the important measures
to protect the MEC environment from such threats. To handle
Network security attack, Intrusion detection systems can be
employed in MEC data center.
Virtualization and physical servers can be protected
through hypervisor hardening, network abstraction and
isolation policies.
Privacy is again an important factor to be considered. It is
mandatory to secure user’s data, location, usage etc. This is
quite challenging. Aggregation schemes such as homomorphic
encryption can secure users information which is discussed in
paper [20]. It uses a super increasing sequence to structure
multidimensional data and encrypt by the homomorphic
cryptosystem technique.
Figure 11: Threats in Mobile Edge Computing
Another privacy issue is user’s location. GPS has is both
boon and a bane. With the help of GPS attackers will be able
to track the location of the users. In order to address this issue
MobiShare system is widely used.
The author of the paper [17], concluded that having
encryption module at mobile device end and HSM (hardware
security module) at the cloud end will be the better solutions
to information security and data privacy.
C. Security and Privacy issues in Cloudlets
We all know that Cloudlet is a reliable, resource rich
cluster which operates only when connected to the internet.
This dependency makes it not immune to the security and
privacy threats.
The author [21] proposes a data security protocol which
not only protects the data from unauthorized user but also
prevents exposure of data to the cloud owner. It offloads all
the complex computations on the cloudlet and allows
lightweight wireless devices to securely store and retrieve
their data in the cloud.
One of the interesting proposals in the field of edge
computing is cloudlet mesh architecture [22], which provides
security enforcement to establish a better cloud environment
not effected by security and privacy issues.
According to this proposal, the cloudlet mesh is a WIFI or
mobile-connected over the internet which acts as a shield
against the spam, virus, worm attacks and stops unauthorized
access to the data in cloud.
TABLE II. THREATS AND SOLUTIONS
Threats or attacks Cloudlet
Virus, worms, malware Protects by verifying files
attacks and content used by the user
Identity theft and Need to authenticate cloudlet
authentication user, public cloud also
 Threats or attacks Cloudlet
Cloud offloading and file Data caching at cloudlet
transfer improvising performance
Various protocols have been proposed in [22], to secure
the end devices of the user and the central cloud which are as
follows:
• Multi-party Authentication Protocol: This is mainly
used for mobility management, multi way
authentication.
• Inter-Cloudlet Protocol: This protocol can detect
unwanted operations with the help of cloudlet
installed with Intrusion detection system (IDS). This
system protects the cloudlet from fake users by
maintaining a database which consists of actual users.
This prevents the fake users from involving in
communication between the user, cloudlet and distant
cloud.
• Trusted cloud transfer Protocol: According to this
protocol, for every request from the user to cloud or
vice versa, the cloudlet uses TCTP to encrypt the data
which is being sent to the distant cloud. The process
in which the TCTP handshaking protocol takes place
id:
1)Whenever a mobile user request for a contact of
the cloudlet, Certificate Authority (CA) sends a
public key to the cloudlet.
2)The data which is transmitted to the cloud is
usually encrypted. The cloudlet scans every packet of
data and detects virus or spam. If anything is found it
issues an alert otherwise the data is sent to the device.
3)The packet will be sent back if the cloudlet
hasn’t heard anything from the device. It notifies the
device accordingly after receiving any report from
the distant cloud.
These measures will really help in preserving the
security in the cloudlet.
Figure 12: Threats in Cloudlets
VIII. FUTURE RESEARCH WORK
Fog Computing, Mobile Edge Computing and Cloudlet are
the main edge computing technologies. Each one of them have
different characteristics and offers different services to the
user. Much research work is going on to improvise these
technologies and to develop new features to meet the needs of
different customers. With this mature state in cloud computing
environment there are many aspects to discuss. The main
aspect to consider is, there are no strict policies or standards to
monitor these technologies. So, it becomes clear that if the
policies are standardized, there would be a better clarity on the
features and information of edge nodes [6], giving a better
environment to the end user.
Recently, Mist Computing has been introduced. It
captures the most extreme edge of the connected or user
devices [11]. This system is clearly proposed keeping future
self-aware and automatic systems in mind. It is also named as
IoT computing or Things computing. Mist computing can be
used to reduce the load in traditional WiFi infrastructures by
distributing the load accordingly between the nearest edge. It
can preserve the privacy of user’s data by processing it in local
environment.
In today’s era of smart phones and tablets, to increase
the speed and performance of the application all the mobile
applications are moving to cloud. This trend predicts that with
more and more devices moving to cloud there is a necessity of
revisiting the already existing security and privacy controls to
cope up with the current challenges. Hence, we can say that
the future work lies in establishing the standardized privacy
and security controls within the edge computing technologies
discussed in the paper to survive the coming advancements in
security needs.
It is obvious that Edge Computing technologies require
more sophisticated setup when compared to the pure cloud
computing systems. It involves many patterns and resources
which requires scientific scrutiny for the better performance.
In order to bridge this gap, a new simulator tool
EdgeCloudSim has been proposed [25]. In this paper the
author clearly discussed about the existing scrutiny techniques
like CloudSim, Omnet++, Opnet, NS-3 etc. and talks about the
existing works. CloudSim is a simulation tool which allows
modelling of cloud computing infrastructure and application
services in the standard cloud computing setup. Drawbacks of
CloudSim are lack of wireless LAN, lack of mobile nodes,
lack of realistic VMs etc. EdgeCloudSim addresses all the
above issues. It supports simulating multiple edge nodes
system where edge servers are running in parallel with the
central cloud.
EdgeCloudSim is available as an open source project
which allows its users to incorporate their needs in the tool.
The paper has demonstrated the working of the tool on various
architectures and environments and the results truly show
positive effect on the performance.
 IX. CHALLENGES
Having discussed a variety of edge computing
technologies and several research papers, we can learn about
the challenges faced in these technologies. Though Fog
computing, Edge computing, Cloudlet, decentralize cloud
computing, these technologies often rely on centralized cloud
platform. Hence, these technologies not only draw the good
things from the cloud but also the challenges faced in the
existing architecture. Let us discuss some of the important
challenges in edge computing environment [1] [2] [11] [24]:
• Security and Privacy:
Security is not only one of the important
challenges faced in the present day but also remains
the most important challenges faced in the future
edge applications. Future edge cloud uses multiple
technologies which also multiplies the security and
privacy issues. As edge cloud is nothing but the
extension of the actual cloud, it draws most of the
issues from the earlier technologies. Since the edge
clouds are closer to the end users they appear to be
more fragile due to the frequent access from various
users. As edge cloud is an open platform it hosts
various third-party hardware and software. So,
software security is also important. Confidentiality,
Integrity and availability are the main principles of
information security.
Appropriate authentication, Authorization
measure are necessary to identify the trusted parties
and to defend unnecessary access request from
miscellaneous sources which are not safe. This also
protects the privacy of user’s data without being
public to all the users.
• Coordination between IOT devices and the Edge:
The main concept of edge computing paradigm is
to deploy edge servers in proximity to the end users,
IoT devices, between the cloud and the user. How the
edge servers and the connected devices coordinate
will have impact on the performance of the system.
To address this issue VMs have come into picture.
Instead of sending the data to distant cloud for
computation, VMs can dynamically be launched in
the edge location and can be used for local
computing. This reduces the cost of offloading to the
cloud.
• Quality of Service:
Quality of Service normally comprises of quality
of connectivity, data delivery delay, response time
etc. With the involvement of various parameters in
the edge computing environment QoS is always
questionable. Adhering to the rules and regulations of
the system we can easily achieve the service quality.
• Power Consumption:
Optimizing the energy consumption in the edge
computing architecture is a serious challenge to be
considered. Involving many number of nodes,
complex data collecting, transmitting and computing
increases the power consumption drastically.
Efficient management and utilization of the edge
nodes, data packets and other resources results in
reduced power consumption.
• Cost:
The cost of each new technology influences the
existing cost. The cost of integrating all the necessary
new technologies to the existing architecture must be
monitored. Optimizing the cost is a real time
challenge. The idea is to develop a application with
secure architecture and least cost. Hence, the
developed architecture has to avoid the modules that
consume power unnecessarily to optimize the
functionalities.
• Deployment Issues:
Excessive increase in the layers while
implementing edge computing technologies, might
cause deployment issues. It might result in latency
problems. Deployment decisions must be taken
considering the requirements like how many sensors
are needed, task division on edge nodes etc.
Application and resource optimizing play a very
important role while deploying a particular
environment whether it is fog computing or mobile
computing or cloudlet.
• Infrastructure related issues:
With the accelerating advancements in edge
computing technology there are many open
challenges due to its interoperable architecture. This
open architecture needs to support all kinds of time-
sensitive applications.
• Failure management:
The probability of failure occurrence is high in
the edge computing environment because of its
distributed and decentralized nature. Software failure,
Hardware failure or failure due to the user’s activity
might be some of the reasons of failure. Beside these
problems there are some other issues like
connectivity, power source etc. Wireless
communication is the main mode of communication
in the edge technologies and it is obvious that
wireless communication is not reliable and is immune
to system failures. As most of the devices connected
to the edge clouds are run on power, we need to
ensure that their battery is monitored and do not fail.
• Communication between different layers:
Let us consider an example of automatic car. In
case of emergency failure in connectivity might cause
severe harm. Hence, in such situations even if
connectivity to the distant cloud fails, the
environment needs to ensure the connectivity to the
nearest edge server. Hence, the cross-layer
communication between the cloud, edge cloud, user
is very important and how the connectivity issues are
handled is still a research topic.
• Application related issues:
Multiple Applications run on the shared
environment in edge clouds. Hence, this environment
 is not immune to security and privacy attacks which
might degrade the performance of the cloud. So, it is
important to address the application-level security
issues like appropriate application isolation, shared
traffic and data access for multiple applications.
• Application modelling:
Modelling applications in edge computing
technologies is quite complex because it involves
collection and processing of complex data. Other
concern is to deploy those applications with minimal
efforts. To solve this issue, a standard communication
protocol is necessary. This allows the proper
communication with the Cloud, User, IoT devices
and Edge nodes.
• Auditability and Forensics:
As data is not maintained locally, it is difficult to
audit data held outside the organization in the distant
cloud which is available to many other users.
• Resource Monitoring:
Monitoring plays a very important role when
there are multiple users for a specific application. So,
developing resource monitoring techniques are very
much essential.
X. EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATIONS
Several studies in edge computing area have conducted
experiments to verify the concepts and ideas experimentally.
In this section, let us look into some of the experiments
conducted in the previous research papers:
A. Evaluation of Mobile Gaming using prototype Edge
Computing Platform
Mobile gaming is one of the currently available
technologies. Evaluating the edge technologies in this scenario
is meaningful. The paper [12] conducts the evaluation of edge
computing in a GamingAnywhere platform. They used
Neverball game, where the user needs quick responses from
the server to have a good quality of experience. It uses a
mobile phone (end device) that sends the relevant game input
to the gaming server, which in turn renders the content and
streams the video back to the end-device. They considered
three different server deployment scenarios: a local
deployment at the network edge, a special purpose cloud
computing infrastructure, and a commercial public cloud
provider.
The experiment mainly concentrates on network delay,
overhead of different technologies and the impact of edge
computing on the processing delay. The results show that the
network delay and overhead is more in the normal cloud when
compared to the cloud service which hosts edge nodes. This
proves that hosting computing resources very close to the end-
users, is the better option to achieve a satisfactory quality of
experience
However, the experiments involved only one end-user.
Hence, more investigation has to be done to understand the
performance when it is connected to multiple users.
B. Experiments with Light Weight Virtualization
Technologies
The authors of the paper [11] conducted experiments to
evaluate three container tools namely, Google Kubernetes,
Docker Swarm, Apache Marathon and to study their
performance for IoT applications. The experiment is
conducted based on three requirements. Firstly,
adding/removing a new node must be a seamless process.
Second, Specific node communication has to be enabled.
Third, all the resources available at the node must be
accessible by the container on top of it. They proposed a new
container based on Docker for fog computing environment
that can meet all the above requirements
C. Experiments with High Computation Applications
Interactive applications are said to be challenging for edge
computing and cloudlets. The authors in [11] proposed a new
serverless architecture for MEC environments to reach high
throughput and keeping low latency. The experiment is
conducted on mobile AR application, in which captured
frames from the camera must be analyzed to detect the object.
Various experimental studies on multi player online games,
machine learning packages, prove that the deploying
computational loads at the edge of the network can improve
the performance drastically.
XI. DISCUSSION
The paper attempted to discuss about most of the important
information one should know about the edge computing
technologies. Fog computing, mobile computing and cloudlets
share the vision of edge computing technology but each one is
different from one another in terms of architecture,
implementation, customers, data handling techniques etc. Lack
of standardization is clearly pictured in all the
implementations which effects the features and requirements
of the user. Hence, more research into this area would result in
better standards and implementation of edge computing.
Offloading computation to regional data centers reduces
network latency ensuring better quality of experience for the
end users. So, deploying computing resources at the edge
helps improve the performance of the system. It would be
interesting if future research work is done to compare the
performance of different edge computing platforms in
different application specific scenarios.
Confidentiality, Availability and Integrity has to be the
promising services offered by the cloud. This allows many
users to protect their data from intruder attacks. Recently we
have seen several incidents on Facebook, AWS which clearly
show that the cloud is not immune such security attacks. Data
handling seems to be the nightmare to the service providers.
Security is still a research issue. Few related researches in the
field of security and privacy is always encouraged.
MEC has the potential to emerge as the best edge
computing technology, provided it concentrates more on
security & privacy issues, battery, efficient data handling and
open issues. We have discussed about the technology of
MEC, applications, research challenges and some issues int
his paper. Future work can be concentrated on designing
scalable techniques which supports high speed users.
The below table depicts the information of the articles in
various conferences which are used in this survey paper.
TABLE III. INFORMATION
Category Papers
Foundation [1] [2] [6] [12] [26]
[2] [3] [10] [20] [27]
Framework and Architecture
Design and Implementation [2] [10] [12] [22]
[2] [4] [7] [10] [11] [12] [14]
Applications
[21] [22]
[10] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19]
Security and Privacy
Challenges [6] [10] [12] [23] [25]
Evaluation [11] [24]
XII. CONCLUSION
Edge Computing has still the potential to offer more
efficient distributed computing. Though it is the best solution
for storage and computing, there are many unsolved issues.
This paper is a survey on different edge computing
technologies and implementations. It also presents a brief
study on security, privacy issues and the challenges in field of
edge computing paradigm. IoT is accelerating and is beneficial
to many businesses. Due to the benefits of IoT, it is expected
to connect with billions of devices and users. Hence, this
paper provided a taxonomy of research topics in edge
computing for IoT. The information provided in this paper
might help us in developing efficient edge nodes which enable
to improvise the performance of the application. The focal
purpose of this paper is to summarize the edge computing
technologies.
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