Cloud and Edge Computing for the Next Generation of Internet of Things Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Cloud Computing technologies have revolutionized and transformed the ICT ecosystem in recent decades by introducing new architectural and design paradigms and giving a worthy centralized and powerful reference for applications and services. On-demand Cloud resources and services have allowed client/server, distributed, and mobile applications to dramatically speed up development and deployment and easily scale to reach a massive number of devices and users all over the world. Furthermore, within this dynamic ecosystem, Cloud computing also represents a natural and easy way to design and to deploy IoT applications where the centralized brain controls and processes all the generated information. Thanks to the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution and its quick and pervasive evolution, we now have millions of interconnected “Smart Objects” able to generate and consume a massive amount of heterogeneous data.
Nevertheless, due to several key factors (e.g., performance, latency, security, interaction patterns), a Cloud-centric vision is not always applicable and does not represent the best fit for all applications and deployments. As a response to fit those applications, Fog/Edge computing has been recently envisioned. Fog/Edge solutions aim to support and to drive the IoT evolution through the definition of a new and scalable distributed architecture, improving performance and enabling the creation of new services.
In this challenging context, the efficient, intelligent, secure, and coordinated integration of Cloud and Edge services and applications will represent a crucial pillar for enabling the next generation of IoT applications.
This Special Issue focuses on novel developments, technologies, and challenges related to the efficient and innovative coexistence of Cloud and Fog/Edge computing, and in particular to their adoption within the Internet of Things research field. We are particularly interested in the latest findings from research, ongoing projects, and in review articles that can provide readers with current research trends and solutions. The potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Hybrid Cloud and Edge computing architectures
• Adoption of Cloud computing patterns and technologies to the Edge
• Cloud and Edge Lambda functions
• Distributed knowledge and data synchronization algorithms
• Services and microservice migration and orchestration between Cloud and Edge
• Distributed machine learning architecture
• Convergence of Edge and Cloud computing for machine learning
• Smart object virtualization and digital twins solutions
• Optimized networking between Edge and Cloud
• Security for hybrid architectures
• Cyber security for IoT and edge computing
• LPWANs and edge computing
• Platforms and applications
• 5G and Mobile Edge computing

Prof. Pietro Manzoni
Prof. Johann M. Marquez-Barja
Prof. Marco Picone
Guest Editors

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