Edge computing has gained attention from both academia and industry by pursuing two significant challenges: 1) moving latency critical services closer to the users, 2) saving network bandwidth by aggregating large flows before sending them to the cloud. While the rationale appeared sound at its inception almost a decade ago, several current trends are impacting it. Clouds have spread geographically reducing end-user latency, mobile phones' computing capabilities are improving, and network bandwidth at the core keeps increasing. In this paper, we scrutinize edge computing, examining its outlook and future in the context of these trends. We perform extensive client-to-cloud measurements using RIPE Atlas, and show that latency reduction as motivation for edge is not as persuasive as once believed; for most applications the cloud is already "close enough" for majority of the world's population. This implies that edge computing may only be applicable for certain application niches, as opposed to a general-purpose solution.
Vehicular communication applications require an efficient communication architecture for timely information delivery. Centralized, cloud-based infrastructures present latencies too high to satisfy the requirements of emergency information processing and transmission, while Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication is too variable for reliable in-time information transmission. In this paper, we present EAVVE, a novel Vehicle-to-Everything system, consisting of vehicles with and without comprehensive data processing capabilities, facilitated by edge servers co-located with roadside units. Adding computation capabilities at the edge of the network allows reducing the overall latency compared to vehicle-to-cloud and makes up for scenarios in which invehicle computational power is not sufficient to satisfy the service demand. To improve the offloading efficiency, we propose a decentralized algorithm for real-time task scheduling and a client/server algorithm for information filtering. We demonstrate the practical applications of EAVVE with a bandwidth-hungry, latency constrained real-life prototype system that connects vehicular vision through Augmented Reality vision. We evaluate this prototype system with real-life road tests. We complement this practical evaluation with extensive simulations based on realworld base station and vehicular traffic data to demonstrate the scalability of EAVVE and its performance in citywide scenarios. EAVVE decreases the latency by 42.6% and 78.7% compared to local and remote cloud solutions while relaxing congestion at the bottleneck by 99% with reasonable infrastructure expenditure.
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