Fault Tolerant Edge Computing: Challenges and Opportunities

Edge computing has received much attention from industry and academia during the past few years, owing to its inherent merits in improving latency and saving bandwidth. Unlike cloud computing which is supported by over two decades of research, edge computing is a relatively new field of study. Therefore, important challenges such as dependability and fault tolerance have not been fully explored. This poses potential risks for the rapidly growing adoption of the edge computing paradigm. This paper summarizes edge computing's dependability challenges, emerging use cases, related industry standards, and state-of-the-art fault tolerance research in this field. Furthermore, we present the most pertinent open research problems and opportunities in the field of fault-tolerant edge computing.