Edge Computing is a paradigm that brings computing and data storage to the location where it is needed. Through this paradigm, the data produced by the devices, especially the internet of things, is allowed to be processed closer to where they were created, instead of sending them through long journeys to reach the data centers.

The main characteristic of 5G - in addition to its high bandwidth - is the low latency it allows, of the order of five milliseconds. Until now when the data is generated, it travels through fiber cables to a data center, where it is processed to be sent back to the user, with the consequent increase in latency.

The cloud computing infrastructure -until now installed in the data centers- is now on the devices of the telecommunications providers at the edge of the 5G network where the information will be processed. With this new paradigm the following is achieved:

• Provide developers with the necessary computing tools to develop final applications with latencies of the order of 5ms or less.
• Cost savings in infrastructure and space. The fact of being able to develop this technology means that data centers are replaced by a more distributed model.
• Reduction of the congestion of the core of the network, since the information does not travel to the data center.
• Greater security, since the data does not travel through the network, the information crosses less devices and therefore greater security.

Today, large cloud companies such as Amazon Web Services recently offer edge computing solutions in certain areas of the United States. The platform in the case of AWS is called Wavelength, and the operators with which it has an agreement are Verizon, Vodafone business, KDDI and SK Telecom.

The services that can be integrated into edge computing today are: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes, AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS CloudFormation, and AWS Autoscaling.

¿Edge computing in Spain?

Since it is a very specific innovation, there are few projects that address edge computing in Spain. In Barcelona there is a company called Nearby Computing created by researchers from the National Supercomputing Center of Barcelona (BSC-CNS), which develops software to be applied in Edge Computing environments, thus carrying out a more efficient use of the network.

On the other side, big Cloud companies,  are already implementing their data centers in Spain even though they are not yet available. AWS has already announced that it will install three data centers in Aragon that will be will be ready in 2022.

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