FemtoClouds beyond the Edge: The Overlooked Data Centers

The proliferation of smart IoT/mobile devices has ignited the development of new applications that not only require additional compute resources but add new constraints of privacy and low latency. This trend has motivated the recent edge/fog computing paradigm, which introduces a middle tier of rich resources between cloud and IoT/mobile devices. In this article, we argue for the overlooked compute opportunity that lies beyond the traditional edge/fog paradigms, which we refer to as FemtoClouds. Femto-Clouds represent pools of beyond edge idle IoT devices that have computational capacity competitive with traditional data centers and potentially are available at lower costs. With proper enabling technologies and addressing their challenges, FemtoClouds can be leveraged as a complementary platform to the current computational options spectrum.