Software-Defined Networking Enhanced Edge Computing: A Network-Centric Survey

Edge computing is burgeoning along with the rapidly increasing adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT). While there are studies on various aspects of edge computing, we find there is a lack of network perspective. In this paper, we, thus, first present an overview of how software-defined networking (SDN) and related technologies are being investigated in edge computing. Our purpose is to survey the state of the art and discuss the potential (remaining) challenges for future research. For this, we survey how SDN and related technologies are integrated to facilitate the management and operations of edge servers and various IoT devices. For the former, we review how SDN has been utilized in the access network, the core network, and the wide area network (WAN) between the edge and the cloud. For the latter, we focus on how SDN is leveraged to provide unified and programmable interfaces to manage devices. Through our discussion, we suggest that the SDN-related network support for edge computing deserves more in-depth investigations. We also identify several challenges and open issues to be addressed in the future.