Articulating the IoT edge – core of the network
The edge is the interface between the IoT devices and the core network: some challenges encountered by IoT devices have their continuity at the edge of the network inside the gateway (i.e., interoperability, heterogeneity, and mobility support).
On the one hand, heterogeneous low-end IoT devices sense, pre-process, and feed data to remote entities (e.g., cloud, artificial intelligence), while physically interacting with the environment (e.g., actuators or other IoT devices). On the other hand, high-end IoT devices such as smartphones and connected cars often fetch large (multimedia) content from the core of the network. Both low-end and high-end IoT devices resort to delegating some computation to more capable remote machines.
This brings the need for IoT devices to interact either with the core of the Internet (e.g., with service providers or cloud computing networks) or with the new architectures bringing network functions and contents to the edge of the Internet (e.g., Fog computing network, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) servers, or Cloudlet network). This latter edge architectures interface IoT devices to the core of the Internet. Besides, the edge should be able to support intermediary functions between devices and the rest of the core (e.g., the cloud).
The team activities related to such edge-core network interaction encompass the following research directions:
- proxying functionality, facilitating connections between devices and the Internet;
- machine-learning enhanced solutions, designed to improve performance of advanced IoT networked systems (e.g., through methods such as supervised, unsupervised or reinforcement) at adapted levels of the protocol stack (e.g., for multiple access, coding, choices);
- intermediary computation through fog or Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) models, where IoT devices can obtain computing, data storage, and communication means with lower latency in a decentralized way;
- security of end-to-end IoT software supply-chain, including remote management and over-the-air updates.
