EDGE COMPUTING USE
CASES
1. AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES
AUTONOMOUS PLATOONING OF TRUCK CONVOYS WILL LIKELY BE ONE OF THE FIRST USE
CASES FOR AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES. HERE, A GROUP OF TRUCK TRAVEL CLOSE BEHIND ONE
ANOTHER IN A CONVOY, SAVING FUEL COSTS AND DECREASING CONGESTION. WITH EDGE
COMPUTING, IT WILL BE POSSIBLE TO REMOVE THE NEED FOR DRIVERS IN ALL TRUCKS EXCEPT
THE FRONT ONE, BECAUSE THE TRUCKS WILL BE ABLE TO COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER
WITH ULTRA-LOW LATENCY.
2. CLOUD GAMING
Cloud gaming, a new kind of gaming which streams a live feed of the
game directly to devices, (the game itself is processed and hosted in
data centres) is highly dependent on latency.
Cloud gaming companies are looking to build edge servers as close to
gamers as possible in order to reduce latency and provide a fully
responsive and immersive gaming experience.
3. TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT
• Edge computing can enable more effective city traffic management.
Examples of this include optimising bus frequency given fluctuations
in demand, managing the opening and closing of extra lanes, and, in
future, managing autonomous car flows.
With edge computing, there is no need to transport large volumes of
traffic data to the centralized cloud, thus reducing the cost of
bandwidth and latency.
4. SMART HOMES
• Smart homes rely on IoT devices collecting and processing data from
around the house. Often this data is sent to a centralized remote server,
where it is processed and stored. However, this existing architecture has
problems around backhaul cost, latency, and security.
• By using edge compute and bringing the processing and storage closer to
the smart home, backhaul and roundtrip time is reduced, and sensitive
information can be processed at the edge. As an example, the time taken
for voice-based assistant devices such as Amazon’s Alexa to respond would
be much faster.
5. IN-HOSPITAL PATIENT MONITORING
• Healthcare contains several edge opportunities. Currently, monitoring
devices (e.g. glucose monitors, health tools and other sensors) are either
not connected, or where they are, large amounts of unprocessed data from
devices would need to be stored on a 3rd party cloud. This presents security
concerns for healthcare providers.
• An edge on the hospital site could process data locally to maintain data
privacy. Edge also enables right-time notifications to practitioners of
unusual patient trends or behaviors (through analytics/AI), and creation of
360-degree view patient dashboards for full visibility.
6.VIRTUALISED RADIO NETWORKS AND
5G (VRAN)
• Operators are increasingly looking to virtualise parts of their
mobile networks (vRAN). This has both cost and flexibility
benefits. The new virtualised RAN hardware needs to do
complex processing with a low latency. Operators will
therefore need edge servers to support virtualising their RAN
close to the cell tower
Use Case Brief Description
Autonomous Vehicles Edge computing enables autonomous platooning of truck convoys,
E
Autonomous Vehicles potentially eliminating the need for drivers in all trucks except the front
one enableonomous png of truck convoys, potentially eliminating the need for drivers in all trucks except the front one.
Remote Monitoring of Oil Enables real-time analytics with processing closer to the remote
and Gas Assets asset, reducing reliance on connectivity to a centralised cloud. me
analytics with processing closer to the remote asset, reducing reliance on
Predictive Maintenance Brings processing and storage of data closer to the equipment,
allowing for real-time health monitoring and analytics nergy consumption by enabling
real-time visibility of energy use and analysis of consumption.
In-Hospital Patient Edge computing on-site provides data privacy, real-time
Monitoring notifications to practitioners, and comprehensive patient
dashboards. g and storage of data closer to the equipment, allowing for real-time health monitoring and analytics.
Virtualised Radio Networks Enables complex processing with low latency for virtualised RAN
and 5G (vRAN) hardware.
Cloud Gaming Cloud gaming companies are using edge servers to reduce
latency and improve the gaming experience.
Content Delivery
Improves content delivery by caching content at the edge,
significantly reducing latency.
Traffic Management
Edge computing allows effective city traffic management,
optimizing bus frequency, lane usage, and future autonomous
