Cloud vs edge: Who serves the Internet-of-Things better?

Abstract

Usually announced to the ICT community as rivals in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) context, cloud and edge could work together according to their respective capabili-ties. Today’s IoT applications can be dependent neither on a single technology (either SQL or noSQL) nor on a single operation model (either centralized or decentralized). The multiple challenges are complexity of user scenarios, multiplicity of things, sen-sitivity of data, etc. This paper raises the question of who serves IoT better? Cloud, only; edge, only; or both together. To answer this question, clouds’ and edges’ duties are identified and then a set of collaborative scenarios are discussed with respect to these duties.