Background

This chapter introduces the background knowledge related to the contents of this book. A brief introduction of 5G network and beyond and edge computing is presented in Sects. 1.1 and 1.2, including the concepts, research/standard progress, advancements in industries, etc. In particular, the advancements of public edge platforms are introduced in Sect. 1.2. Key technologies for edge computing in 5G and beyond, i.e., multi-edge computation offloading, dynamic workload scheduling, edge caching, and edge resource provisioning, are introduced in Sect. 1.3. In Sect. 1.4, 5G-based edge computing system and edge computing for 5G beyond are presented. As the 5G-based edge computing system is designed on the basis of service-based architecture (SBA) of 5G, Sect. 1.4.1 first presents the SBA architecture of 5G core network. For the 5G beyond network, satellite edge computing (Sect. 1.4.2) is envisioned as a potentially significant computing paradigm. Section 1.4.3 summarizes the background and research progress of satellite edge computing and further briefly introduces the research and practice directions toward space–ground integrated computing architecture.