Sponsored by the Services Society and the Technical Committee on Services Computing (TC-SVC), IEEE Computer Society.

Human beings have been cooperating, competing, and entertaining ourselves by providing and consuming all kinds of services. We build, deploy, publish, and discover services, and with the current prevailing technology, we use clouds that are formed of computers and servers connected by the Internet, and developed using wire-based and wireless technology. Many enterprises and large organizations have begun to adopt small and mobile devices, sensors and actuators that provide data and services to users or other devices, and those devices will become more intelligent as technology progresses. We must deal with huge amount of data, big data that must be transferred from/to distant, sometimes very distant sources, stored and processed by data and compute clouds. As direct service links between clouds may not enable fast enough data access, reliability could be jeopardized, availability cannot be completely guaranteed, and the entire system is subject to security attacks, there is a need for significant future improvements. Due to the sizes of enterprises and large organizations, some smaller clouds, that could be stationary as well as mobile, are being proposed to improve these metrics. This is where the concept of Edge Computing, together with the necessary and possible intelligent management and control at the edge, comes to play. 

“Edge Computing” is a process of building a distributed system in which some applications, as well as computation and storage services, are provided and managed by (i) central clouds and smart devices, the edge of networks in small proximity to mobile devices, sensors, and end users; and (ii) others are provided and managed by the center cloud and a set of small in-between local clouds supporting IoT at the edge. This dual architecture allows for Edge Computing. Edge Computing is practically a cloud-based middle layer between the center cloud and the edges, hardware and software that provide specialized services. The problem is how to execute such a process, how to manage the whole system, how to define and create Fogs and Edges, provide workflow, and how to provide Edge Computing (compute, storage, networking) services. Many open problems still exist, as they are not even properly specified, as the Edge Computing itself is not fully yet defined.

IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing (EDGE) aims to become a prime international forum for both researchers and industry practitioners to exchange the latest fundamental advances in the state of the art and practice of Edge computing, identify emerging research topics, and define the future of Edge computing. EDGE covers the localized resource sharing and connections with the cloud.