Edge Computing and its Role in Smart City Architecture

Abstract

The swift growth in the number of smart city projects has heightened the need to have responsive, scalable, and secure digital infrastructures able to handle the huge amounts of real-time data. Edge computing has become a new disruptive technology that decentralizes data processing by shifting computation nearer to the data sources (sensors, cameras, and other connected devices). In this paper, the author will discuss how edge computing can be used to design an efficient smart city architecture and compare it with how efficient urban services are optimized by using edge computing. Edges enable systems can improve the performance of important city services such as intelligent transportation, energy management, and waste monitoring, public safety, and environmental surveillance by reducing the latency, lowering bandwidth usage, and accelerating decision-making decisions. The paper examines architectural designs that incorporate edge, fog, and cloud layers to form hybrid frameworks that would trade off between local responsiveness and centralized analytics. It examines the distributed processing to enhance resilience to network failures and enhances privacy by localized data processing. Moreover, the study examines the interoperability issues, the cybersecurity threats, the scalability, and the governance challenges related to the deployment of edge infrastructures within urban ecosystems with complex structure. Not case-based examples are emphasized on how network-edge analytics in the real-time is utilized to aid predictive maintenance, traffic optimization, and emergency response coordination. The findings indicate that edge computing is not a technical upgrading but either an organizational or structural need of sustainable development of smart cities. These proper implementations should be standardized, effective in security controls and policy frameworks capable of assisting in maintaining technological innovation in accordance with the goals of urban planning. Incorporating intelligence into the network edges will enable smart cities to become more efficient in their operation, consumer outreach and responsive resource allocation. This paper has concluded that edge computing is a support pillar in the next-generation urban architecture, which allows cities to shift to become data-driven, resilient, and human-centered.