Cloud, Edge, or Both? Towards Decision Support for Designing IoT Applications

The rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) includes applications which might generate a huge amount of data, this requires appropriate platforms and support methods. Cloud computing offers attractive computational and storage solutions to cope with these issues. However, sending to centralized servers all the data generated at the edge of the network causes latency, energy consumption, and high bandwidth demand. Performing some computations at the edge of the network, known as Edge computing, and using a hybrid Edge-Cloud architecture can help addressing these challenges. While such architecture may provide new opportunities to distribute IoT applications, making optimal decisions regarding where to deploy the different application components is not an easy and straightforward task for designers. Supporting designers' decisions by considering key quality attributes impacting them in an Edge-Cloud architecture has not been investigated yet. In this paper, we: explore the importance of decision support for the designers, discuss how different attributes impact the decisions, and describe the required steps toward a decision support framework for IoT application designers.