Edge layers

[mtrifiro]

Potentially useful fodder of the The Taxonomy Project

I’m seeing four different layers of the new IoT computing infrastructure evolve. There’s the cloud, but then there’s the edge, which can be divided into three layers.

The first, and smallest, is the device, the sensors and connected devices that are usually battery-powered, use mesh networks, and have relatively small computing footprints.

The second is the gateway layer. It’s where the sensor data comes into a box on the factory floor or a server located in an autonomous car. In the home, the gateway might be a Wi-Fi router or set-top box with computing and a variety of radios to bridge the various low-power mesh communication protocols.

The third layer is a larger cluster of servers geographically close to the sensors, able to process data and provide regionalized services that are latency-sensitive. This is what I’ll call the edge. It may be a micro data center processing all of the data gathered from traffic cameras (but not the video itself, which would be processed at the gateway), or a telco point of presence where a customer might aggregate data from thousands of smart home devices.

The fourth layer is the aforementioned cloud. Not every piece of data will travel through all four layers. A rare few pieces of device data may go directly to the cloud. But in general, this is the framework I’m using to think about edge computing services and startups going forward.

From: How stealth startup Edgeworx helped me rethink the IoT edge

[khatribharat]

This leads to further categorization of Device Edge into

1. Resource Constrained Device - Usually transducers (sensor & actuator systems) that are battery-powered, exhibit power-saving sleep cycles and have low memory and compute on-board. (Ref: https://www.rti.com/blog/announcing-the-dds-xrce-specification-a-protocol-for-sensor-networks)

2. Gateway Device - Act as a) bridge to Access Edge Layer by providing connectors/adapters for industrial protocols used by resource constrained devices and b) Run Data Reduction function for resource constrained devices.

Happy to send a pull request if there's consensus on this.

[alexgmarcham]

I like that separation of the device edge layers, and it mirrors the access and aggregation layers within the infrastructure edge.

[alexgmarcham]

Entries added for:

Resource Constrained Device
A subcategory of the device edge, referring to devices on the device edge side of the last mile network which are often battery-powered and may operate for extended periods of time in a power-saving mode. These devices are typically connected locally to a gateway device, which in turn transmits and receives data generated by and directed to them from sources outside of the local network, such as a data analysis application operating in an edge data center at the infrastructure edge.

Gateway Device
A subcategory of the device edge, referring to devices on the device edge side of the last mile network which operate as gateways for other local devices, with the goal of aggregating and faciliating data transference between local devices, many of which are battery-operated and may operate for extended periods in a low-power state, and external entities such as a data analysis application operating inside an edge data center at the infrastructure edge.