IEEE

Combining Edge and Cloud for smart cities applications

nabil abdennadher

Pr. Nabil Abdennadher

University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland

Tutorial Title: “Combining Edge and Cloud for smart cities applications”

Biography:

Nabil Abdennadher received the Diploma in Engineering (Computer science) from Ecole Nationale des Sciences de l’Informatique (ENSI, Tunisia), and the Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from University of Valenciennes (France) in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He was an assistant professor at the University of Tunis II from 1992 to 1998 and a research assistant at the Computer Science Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) from 1999 to 2000.

In 2001, he joined the Department of Computer Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland (HES-SO, hepia) as an assistant HES professor. In 2008, he became an associate HES professor and in 2017 he was promoted to full HES professor.

He is currently head of both the inIT Research Institute and the Large Scale Distributed Systems research group (lsds.hesge.ch). His major research interests include high performance and distributed computing, Internet of Things and urban computing. Since 2019, he is member of the Swiss Alliance for Data-Intensive Services. He was a member of the Swiss National Grid Association (SwinG) Executive Board from 2008 to 2013.

Nabil Abdennadher participates in several research projects funded by Europe and several Swiss research foundations (InnoSuisse, swissuniversities, Switch AAI, etc.). He is also the founder of two companies in Tunisia and Switzerland.

Abstract:

Cloud computing traditionally serves IoT applications by providing storage for generated data, and CPU power to produce value for their businesses. However, the growth of IoT is affecting the way traditional cloud architectures work. The increased amount of data to be transferred is creating bottlenecks while increasing the latency. Furthermore, sending such a big amount of data to a cloud environment in very short periods of time is inefficient, apart from cumbersome and expensive. This implies that much of
this data must be aggregated at the “end points” where data is collected. And here is where Edge computing comes in.

Edge Computing is not devised as a competitor to cloud; it is envisioned as the perfect ally for a broad spectrum of applications for which traditional Cloud Computing is not sufficient. Combining the edge approach with IoT sensors and Cloud would add flexibility and choices for customers.

This tutorial will answer these questions:

  1. What problems does edge computing solve?
  2. How can we take advantage of the edge computing?
  3. How does edge computing and cloud computing work together?

It will also present current technologies for designing hybrid platforms (edge, cloud) for IoT applications.