Resilience in Edge Computing: Challenges and Concepts

Edge computing has evolved significantly from early research ideas to modern 5G mobile and multi-access edge computing (MEC). In many 6G-related projects, we see a clear trend toward virtualizing computing resources at the edge. Motivated by the cloud-edge-continuum that is the basis for next-generation metaverse applications, and the need for low-latency solutions, distributed computing is now receiving even more attention. A final hurdle for the wide use of (virtualized)edge computing for mission-critical applications is resilience. In this context, resilience is the ability of modern communication and computation systems to deal with unknown and unforeseen events, both from internal and external sources. Thus, making MEC resilient to outages (e.g., system failures or energy outages due to natural disasters), security incidents (e.g., the use of intelligent jamming or malicious users), and overall challenging condition (e.g., high mobility or impaired connectivity) is of the highest importance. In this monograph, we review the current state-of-the-art of resilience in mobile edge computing. We explore MEC-specific challenges and resilience objectives, and discuss selected resilience measures. We trust that this monograph will be an invaluable resource for beginners and experts in the field as a compound resource on resilience in MEC.