Edge computing with peer to peer interactions: use cases and impact

Edge and fog computing applications typically focus on outsourcing computations from static or mobile end user devices towards compute nodes in proximity. However, such applications do not fully exploit the benefits of the edge because the resources of neighboring end user devices are not considered as potential compute nodes. For this reason, we propose complementing edge computing with peer to peer interactions in order to enable the end user devices to communicate with each other and share computations. Peer to peer is a well established communication model that can be used for organizing the available resources based on proximity disregarding their role in the network (i.e., end user device, edge or cloud node). This way, all resources become accessible and computations may be outsourced towards any node. In this paper, we present three edge computing use cases that can benefit from the use of peer to peer interactions. To further motivate the use of peer to peer, we analyze the compatibility with edge computing and the potential impact, and we identify related research directions.