Written by: Mirko Grabel

Edge computing brings a number of benefits to the Internet of Things. Reduced latency, improved resiliency and availability, lower costs, and local data storage (to assist with regulatory compliance) to name a few. In my last blog post I examined some of these benefits as a means of defining exactly where is the edge. Now let’s take a closer look at how edge computing benefits play out in real-world IoT use cases.

Benefit No. 1: Reduced latency

Many applications have strict latency requirements, but when it comes to safety and security applications, latency can be a matter of life or death. Consider, for example, an autonomous vehicle applying brakes or roadside signs warning drivers of upcoming hazards. By the time data is sent to the cloud and analyzed, and a response is returned to the car or sign, lives can be endangered. But let’s crunch some numbers just for fun.

Say a Department of Transportation in Florida is considering a cloud service to host the apps for its roadside signs. One of the vendors on the DoT’s shortlist is a cloud in California. The DoT’s latency requirement is less than 15ms. The light speed in fiber is about 5 μs/km. The distance from the U.S. east coast to the west coast is about 5,000 km. Do the math and the resulting round-trip latency is 50ms. It’s pure physics. If the DoT requires a real-time response, it must move the compute closer to the devices.

Benefit No. 2: Improved resiliency/availability

Critical infrastructure requires the highest level of availability and resiliency to ensure safety and continuity of services. Consider a refinery gas leakage detection system. It must be able to operate without Internet access. If the system goes offline and there’s a leakage, that’s an issue. Compute must be done at the edge. In this case, the edge may be on the system itself.

While it’s not a life-threatening use case, retail operations can also benefit from the availability provided by edge compute. Retailers want their Point of Sale (PoS) systems to be available 100% of the time to service customers. But some retail stores are in remote locations with unreliable WAN connections. Moving the PoS systems onto their edge compute enables retailers to maintain high availability.

Benefit No. 3: Reduced costs

Bandwidth is almost infinite, but it comes at a cost. Edge computing allows organizations to reduce bandwidth costs by processing data before it crosses the WAN. This benefit applies to any use case, but here are two example use-cases where this is very evident: video surveillance and preventive maintenance. For example, a single city-deployed HD video camera may generate 1,296GB a month. Streaming that data over LTE easily becomes cost prohibitive. Adding edge compute to pre-aggregate the data significantly reduces those costs.

Manufacturers use edge computing for preventive maintenance of remote machinery. Sensors are used to monitor temperatures and vibrations. The currency of this data is critical, as the slightest variation can indicate a problem. To ensure that issues are caught as early as possible, the application requires high-resolution data (for example, 1000 per second). Rather than sending all of this data over the Internet to be analyzed, edge compute is used to filter the data and only averages, anomalies and threshold violations are sent to the cloud.

Benefit No. 4: Comply with government regulations

Countries are increasingly instituting privacy and data retention laws. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a prime example. Any organization that has data belonging to an EU citizen is required to meet the GDPR’s requirements, which includes an obligation to report leaks of personal data. Edge computing can help these organizations comply with GDPR. For example, instead of storing and backhauling surveillance video, a smart city can evaluate the footage at the edge and only backhaul the meta data.

Canada’s Water Act: National Hydrometric Program is another edge computing use case that delivers regulatory compliance benefits. As part of the program, about 3,000 measurement stations have been implemented nationwide. Any missing data requires justification. However, storing data at the edge ensures data retention.

Bonus Benefit: “Because I want to…”

Finally, some users simply prefer to have full control. By implementing compute at the edge rather than the cloud, users have greater flexibility. We have seen this in manufacturing. Technicians want to have full control over the machinery. Edge computing gives them this control as well as independence from IT. The technicians know the machinery best and security and availability remain top of mind.

Summary

By reducing latency and costs, improving resiliency and availability, and keeping data local, edge computing opens up a new world of IoT use cases. Those described here are just the beginning. It will be exciting to see where we see edge computing turn up next. 

Originaly posted: here

Originally Posted by: Doug Webster 

With the announcement of the Cisco Solution for LoRAWAN™, Service Providers have an integrated solution that enables them to extend their network reach to where they’ve never gone before – i.e., offering IoT services for devices and sensors that are battery powered, have low data rates and long distance communications requirements. The solution opens new markets and new revenue streams for Service Providers, and can be deployed in a wide range of use cases in Industrial IoT and Smart City applications such as:

• Asset Tracking and Management
• Logistics
• Smart Cities (e.g., smart parking, street lighting, waste management, etc.)
• Intelligent buildings
• Utilities (e.g., water and gas metering)
• Agriculture (e.g., soil, irrigation management)

Our Cisco Mobile Visual Networking Index estimates that while LoRa is in its early stages now, these types of Low Power Wide Area connectivity means will quickly gain traction and that by 2020, there will be more than 860 million devices using it to connect.  One of the reasons for such forecasted aggressive adoption, especially in North America and Western Europe, is that LoRa® works over readily available unlicensed spectrum. Cisco is a founding Board member of the LoRa® Allianceformed in January, 2015, with a goal to standardize LPWA Networks in order to stimulate the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

Cisco has been working with a number of Mobile Operators who are trialing and deploying LoRa® networks to target new low-power consumption IoT services such as metering, location tracking and monitoring services. Many Mobile Operators are looking at LoRa® as complementary to NarrowBand IOT (NB-IOT), an upgrade to current mobile networks that drops the transmit power and data rates of the LTE standard to increase battery life. As NB-IOT networks, devices, and ecosystems will not be commercialized until 2017, LoRa® gives Operators (and all SPs, in fact) a way to gain a head-start on offering new IoT services based on various new low cost business models.

Cisco’s approach to IoT is to deliver integrated solutions that enable SPs to support different class of services aligned with specific pricing models across unlicensed (Wi-Fi, LoRa) and licensed (2G/3G/LTE, and soon, NB-IoT) radio spectrum as demanded by the IoT application. Our multi-access network strategy for IoT is complemented by the Cisco Ultra Services Platform (USP) – our comprehensive, virtualized services core, which includes mobile packet core, policy and services functions. Cisco USP delivers the scalability and flexibility that Operators focusing on IoT need as more and varied “things” get connected to their networks.

Cisco continues to integrate and evolve solutions such as LoraWAN™ to help Service Providers of all types capitalize on new IoT opportunities and transform into next-generation IoT Service Providers.

Last week Tom Davenport, a Distinguished Professor at Babson College, wrote about “GE’s Digital Big Swing” in the Wall Street Journal. As he cites in his latest piece, there are many others taking big swings in digital and IoT overall. (BTW - If you’re not following Tom, you really should do so now. His thoughts are a perfect mix of research and practice covering big data, analytics and changes in the digital landscape.)

During my time at Pivotal, I was witness to the digital big swing that GE took and saw the energy, effort and resources they were committing to make sure that whatever they made that could be connected to the Internet - jet engines, power plants, surgical image machines - would capture all data to improve products and the customer experience. I don’t think GE watchers - investors, competitors, partners - fully understand yet the enormity of this bet.

They keep making moves. This week the company announced the creation of GE Digital, a transformative move that brings together all of the digital capabilities from across the company into one organization.

Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO of GE, said, “As GE transforms itself to become the world’s premier digital industrial company, this will provide GE’s customers with the best industrial solutions and the software needed to solve real world problems. It will make GE a digital show site and grow our software and analytics enterprise from $6B in 2015 to a top 10 software company by 2020.”

GE, the industrial giant, a Top 10 software company? That’s taking GE’s slogan “Imagination at Work” and making it real.

Much like the cloud trend before it, the IoT trend is something where all major vendors are investing.

Yesterday at Salesforce’s behemoth customer conference Dreamforce, the company announced the Salesforce Internet of Things Cloud. Based on a home-grown data processing technology called Thunder, Salesforce touts their IoT Cloud as empowering businesses to connect data from the Internet of Things, as well as any digital content, with customer information, giving context to data and making it actionable—all in real-time.

With perhaps a nod of guilt to marketing hype, other notable big swings include:

• IBM - The company has created an Internet of Things business unit and plans to spend $3 billion to grow its analytics capabilities so that organizations can benefit from the intelligence that connected devices can provide. According to IBM, as much as 90 percent of data that is generated by connected devices is never acted on or analyzed.

• Cisco - Its approach focuses on six pillars for an IoT System - network connectivity, fog computing, security, data analytics, management and automation and an application enablement platform. You can buy all the pieces of the system from Cisco, of course.

• Samsung - They are betting on openness and industry collaboration. By 2017, all Samsung televisions will be IoT devices, and in five years all Samsung hardware will be IoT-ready. They also recently open sourced IoT.js, a platform for IoT applications written in JavaScript, and JerryScript, a JavaScript engine for small, embedded devices.

• Monsanto - Their near billion dollar purchase of The Climate Corporation is combining The Climate Corporation’s expertise in agriculture analytics and risk-management with Monsanto’s R&D capabilities, and will provide farmers access to more information about the many factors that affect the success of their crops.

In the wake of these giant big swings will be new and exciting startups - sensor companies, chip players, software, analytics and device makers. If you know of a compelling start-up in the industrial IOT space, drop me a line at david@iotcentral.io. We would love to hear from you.