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Next generation communication networks are expected to accommodate a high number of new and resource-voracious applications that can be offered to a large range of end users. Even though end devices are becoming more powerful, the available local resources cannot cope with the requirements of these applications. This has created a new challenge called task offloading, where computation intensive tasks need to be offloaded to more resource powerful remote devices. Naturally, the Cloud Computing is a well-tested infrastructure that can facilitate the task offloading. However, Cloud Computing as a centralized and distant infrastructure creates significant communication delays that cannot satisfy the requirements of the emerging delay-sensitive applications. To this end, the concept of Edge Computing has been proposed, where the Cloud Computing capabilities are repositioned closer to the end devices at the edge of the network. This paper provides a detailed survey of how the Edge and/or Cloud can be combined together to facilitate the task offloading problem. Particular emphasis is given on the mathematical, artificial intelligence and control theory optimization approaches that can be used to satisfy the various objectives, constraints and dynamic conditions of this end-to-end application execution approach. The survey concludes with identifying open challenges and future directions of the problem at hand.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has revolutionized the way network services are offered to end users. Individual network functions are decoupled from expensive and dedicated middleboxes and are now provided as software-based virtualized entities called Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). NFV is often complemented with the Cloud Computing paradigm to provide networking functions to enterprise customers and end-users remote from their premises. NFV along with Cloud Computing has also started to be seen in Internet of Things (IoT) platforms as a means to provide networking functions to the IoT traffic. The intermix of IoT, NFV, and Cloud technologies, however, is still in its infancy creating a rich and open future research area. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to facilitate the placement and deployment of service chained VNFs in a network cloud infrastructure that can be extended using the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) infrastructure for accommodating mission critical and delay sensitive traffic. Our aim is to minimize the end-to-end communication delay while keeping the overall deployment cost to minimum. Results reveal that the proposed approach can significantly reduce the delay experienced, while satisfying the Service Providers' goal of low deployment costs.

The potential offered by the abundance of sensors, actuators, and communications in the Internet of Things (IoT) era is hindered by the limited computational capacity of local nodes. Several key challenges should be addressed to optimally and jointly exploit the network, computing, and storage resources, guaranteeing at the same time feasibility for time-critical and mission-critical tasks. We propose the DRUID-NET framework to take upon these challenges by dynamically distributing resources when the demand is rapidly varying. It includes analytic dynamical modeling of the resources, offered workload, and networking environment, incorporating phenomena typically met in wireless communications and mobile edge computing, together with new estimators of time-varying profiles. Building on this framework, we aim to develop novel resource allocation mechanisms that explicitly include service differentiation and context-awareness, being capable of guaranteeing well-defined Quality of Service (QoS) metrics. DRUID-NET goes beyond the state of the art in the design of control algorithms by incorporating resource allocation mechanisms to the decision strategy itself. To achieve these breakthroughs, we combine tools from Automata and Graph theory, Machine Learning, Modern Control Theory, and Network Theory. DRUID-NET constitutes the first truly holistic, multidisciplinary approach that extends recent, albeit fragmented results from all aforementioned fields, thus bridging the gap between efforts of different communities.

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