The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently advanced from an experimental technology to what will become the backbone of future customer value for both product and service sector businesses. This underscores the cardinal role of IoT on the journey toward the fifth generation of wireless communication systems. IoT technologies augmented with intelligent and big data analytics are expected to rapidly change the landscape of myriads of application domains ranging from health care to smart cities and industrial automations. The emergence of multi-access edge computing (MEC) technology aims at extending cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the radio access network, hence providing real-time, high-bandwidth, low-latency access to radio network resources. IoT is identified as a key use case of MEC, given MEC’s ability to provide cloud platform and gateway services at the network edge. MEC will inspire the development of myriads of applications and services with demand for ultralow latency and high quality of service due to its dense geographical distribution and wide support for mobility. MEC is therefore an important enabler of IoT applications and services which require real-time operations. In this survey, we provide a holistic overview on the exploitation of MEC technology for the realization of IoT applications and their synergies. We further discuss the technical aspects of enabling MEC in IoT and provide some insight into various other integration technologies therein.
With the support of mobile cloud computing, wireless body area networks can be significantly enhanced for massive deployment of pervasive healthcare applications. However, several technical issues and challenges are associated with the integration of WBANs and MCC. In this article, we study a cloud-enabled WBAN architecture and its applications in pervasive healthcare systems. We highlight the methodologies for transmitting vital sign data to the cloud by using energy-efficient routing, cloud resource allocation, semantic interactions, and data security mechanisms. The advances in wireless communication technologies, vehicular networks and cloud computing boost a growing interest in the design, development and deployment of Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems (VCPS) for some emerging applications, which leads to an increasing demand on connecting Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) users to VCPS for accessing the richer applications and services. In this paper, we first identify the key requirements of designing an efficient and flexible architecture for integrating MCC and VCPS. Based on the requirements, we design a VCPS and MCC Integration Architecture (VCMIA), which provides mobile services for potential users such as drivers and passengers to access mobile traffic cloud. Then, we ana- lyze two crucial cloud-supported components: GIS with traffic-aware capability and cloud-supported dynamic vehicle routing. Finally, we select Vehicle Maintenance Services (VMS) as an application scenario to carry out the validation. The proposed VCMIA can provide the flexibility for enabling diverse applications.