Internet of Things as a new Internet evolution greatly impels the revolutionary development of network. With the explosion of “things” (expected to be 50 billion devices by 2020), current computing models (e.g. centralized cloud computing) and network architecture face many challenges and limitations in meeting the higher demands of ultra-low latency, huge data processing/computation, and high bandwidth, brought by IoT applications and other emerging services (like 4K videos, VR, AR, etc.). To deal with these challenges, the concept of edge computing is proposed, which attempts to push the computing intelligence and capabilities to the network edge closer to the end users. The recently emerging edge computing models include Mobile Edge Computing (MEC, standardized by ETSI), Fog Computing (proposed by Cisco), Cloudlet (developed by CMU), Micro data center (developed by Microsoft Research), and so on. These approaches, which all aim to move computation, data and control from remote cloud DC to the network edge, to some extent, conceptually partially overlaps and are also complementary. The edge computing enables IoT services to meet the requirements of low latency, high scalability and energy efficiency, as well as mitigate the traffic burdens of the transport network. However, there are still many challenges and open issues needed to be solved in edge computing, such as mobility-aware service migration problems, security and privacy concerns, the deployment optimization of edge servers, the cooperation way between Fog/Cloudlet/Edge computing and cloud computing, the resilience of edge computing system, new edge computing architectures, and so on.

This special issue encourages high quality submissions related to edge computing techniques. Experts and scholars from both industry and academia are encouraged to demonstrate their latest research progress, achievements and potential directions in this area.

Aims and Scope:
Mobile edge computing architecture
Fog computing
Real-time communication between end users and MEC servers
Adoption of SDN/NFV techniques in MEC systems.
Security and privacy of edge computing
Survey on edge computing: open issues, challenges, and opportunities.
Mobility-aware service migration
Cooperation of edge computing, fog computing and cloud computing
Computation offloading techniques
Performance analysis/evaluation of MEC systems
MEC functionalities virtualization
Recovery scheme of failed MEC systems
MEC based data analytics
Admission control for MEC
Pricing and billing models for MEC
Novel applications and services making use of MEC