Bringing the Edge Home: Edge Computing in the Era of Emerging WLANs

With the massive number of devices being added to Internet every day, the cloud infrastructure is struggling to serve them on timely manner with the required quality of service. In addition, the sheer volume of data that needs to be transported between the user devices and the cloud servers is massive and poses bottlenecks on the network infrastructure. In light of these challenges, Edge Computing is seen as a solution that can serve the user devices with less latency and ease the network congestion. Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is one of the prominent solutions proposed recently with the primary focus of mobile cellular networks. However, a closer look at the user applications that require Edge Computing shows that having the Edge Computing facility at houses, offices or factories enable more effective operation and utilization of the capabilities of Edge Computing. Furthermore, the emerging WLANs such as Wi-Fi 6/6E/7, Li-Fi, and Optical Wireless Communication are addressing the indoor network capacity barriers that prevented Edge Computing being deployed closer to the user. Therefore, in this article, we introduce an Edge Computing architecture for wireless local area networks (WLAN) which resides in user premises. The viability and the performance of the architecture is evaluated with the use of Wi-Fi 6 WLAN network.