Edge Computing: A Survey On the Hardware Requirements in the Internet of Things World

In today’s world, ruled by a great amount of data and mobile devices, cloud-based systems are spreading all over. Such phenomenon increases the number of connected devices, broadcast bandwidth, and information exchange. These fine-grained interconnected systems, which enable the Internet connectivity for an extremely large number of facilities (far beyond the current number of devices) go by the name of Internet of Things (IoT). In this scenario, mobile devices have an operating time which is proportional to the battery capacity, the number of operations performed per cycle and the amount of exchanged data. Since the transmission of data to a central cloud represents a very energy-hungry operation, new computational paradigms have been implemented. The computation is not completely performed in the cloud, distributing the power load among the nodes of the system, and data are compressed to reduce the transmitted power requirements. In the edge-computing paradigm, part of the computational power is moved toward data collection sources, and, only after a first elaboration, collected data are sent to the central cloud server. Indeed, the “edge” term refers to the extremities of systems represented by IoT devices. This survey paper presents the hardware architectures of typical IoT devices and sums up many of the low power techniques which make them appealing for a large scale of applications. An overview of the newest research topics is discussed, besides a final example of a complete functioning system, embedding all the introduced features.