Edge, fog, cloud: Issues and overview

Learning objectives

• How low-power hardware and software techniques can balance the edge-processing burden
• Understand the devices that sleep on almost no current and software techniques to improve the power efficiency of edge processing
• Explore the recent advances in low-cost cellular technologies like LTE Cat-M1 and NB-IoT, which offer direct connectivity from edge devices to the cloud using MQTT direct from the edge node
• Learn the tradeoffs involved in “cutting out the middleman” of gateways, and what it means to no longer have that convenient place to perform fog processing.

If you wonder what issues have arisen with increasing use of IIoT technologies for remote operations, analytics or otherwise, this presentation is for you.

Arlen Nipper, codeveloper of the MQTT messaging protocol, says what’s needed in industrial control is a single source of truth for engineering models, production assets and process variables.

“It’s important to understand why having a model is so important,” says Nipper. “For more than 30 years we’ve been awash with ‘Register/Value’ pairs that engineers must feed and care for throughout the life of a system.”

At the same time, says Ed Kuzemchak, CTO at Software Design Solutions, you must do processing where it makes most sense, based on hardware cost, power availability, communications bandwidth and information context.

“Having a standard communications infrastructure is important in systems built of parts from multiple vendors,” says Kuzemchak, “prototyping a system early with off-the-shelf components is a big determinant of ROI.”

In addition, Nipper will discuss why the MQTT protocol has proved so popular and how the technology remains flexible, even as enhanced security and further capabilities become available for it. The latest advancement for the use of MQTT in edge solutions is the Sparkplug specification and the formation of the Sparkplug Working group.

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