Pervasive Computing at the Edge

Today the infrastructure needed to support pervasive computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) is unparalleled as entirely new classes of applications and systems emerge. For example, pervasive systems designed to augment human cognition with tasks such as face recognition must operate at “superhuman speeds,” delivering insights to help with human decision-making within very strict and narrow time limits. Similarly, the emergence of pervasive video analytics demands processing of very large volumes of video data in near-real-time. In general, the field of pervasive computing is rapidly changing in the face of major advances in sensing, data processing techniques, and wearable computing. The ever increasing data rates of high-speed networks also factor into the design tradeoff to decide if computing should be local, or remote.