IoT and 5G are driving computing to the edge

From PC World: By 2020, an average internet user will use 1.5GB of traffic a day, and daily video traffic will reach 1PB, Intel predicts. A huge amount of data will be generated by autonomous vehicles, mobile devices, and internet-of-things devices.

Every day, more information is being collected and sent to faster servers in mega data centers, which analyze and make sense of it. That analysis has helped improved image and speech recognition and is making autonomous cars a reality.

Emerging superfast data networks like 5G -- a melting pot of wireless technologies -- will dispatch even more gathered information, which could stress data centers. Servers are already being redesigned to handle more data, and throughput technologies like Gen-Z and fiber optics will reduce latency.

At Mobile World Congress this week, computing on the edge was a big topic among infrastructure providers. Edge computing involves light processing on intermediary servers or on the edge of the networks. This type of computing can lead to faster responses for mobile services, without putting stress on servers in the core network.

Edge computing can also provide instant analytics to ensure the junk information is discarded and only useful information reaches servers on the core network. Edge computing is also emerging for virtualization, which slices loads of data in smaller packages rerouted to the right servers to be handled.

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