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 proliferation of portable and mobile IoT devices and their increasing processing capability, we witness that the edge of network is moving to the IoT gateways and smart devices. To avoid Big Data issues (e.g. high latency of cloud based IoT), the processing of the captured data is starting from the IoT edge node. However, the available processing capabilities and energy resources are still limited and do not allow to fully process the data on-board. It calls for offloading some portions of computation to the gateway or servers. Due to the limited bandwidth of the IoT gateways, choosing the offloading levels of connected devices and allocating bandwidth to them is a challenging problem. This paper proposes a technique for managing computation offloading in a local IoT network under bandwidth constraints. The existing bandwidth allocation and computation offloading management techniques underutilize the gateway's resources (e.g. bandwidth) due to the fragmentation issue. This issue stems from the discrete coarse-grained choices (i.e. offloading levels) on the IoT end nodes. Our proposed technique addresses this issue, and utilizes the available resources of the gateway effectively. The experimental results show on average 1 hour (up to 1.5 hour) improvement in battery life of edge devices. The utilization of gateway's bandwidth increased by 40 .