The Necessary Shift: Toward a Sufficient Edge Computing

Edge computing is becoming a reality and attracts an increasing interest both from academia and industry. This is driven by its promises of enabling/improving use cases thanks to, e.g., lower latency or alleviated network load. This paves the way for edge computing having a huge impact on our daily lives in the (near) future. However, except works dealing with energy efficiency, studies of the (un)sustainability of edge computing are almost nonexistent, which is worrying. In this article, we advocate the need to go beyond energy efficiency and face the resource impact of edge computing. At this point when we are still able to influence design choices, it is the responsibility of this community to ensure future systems do not become unsustainable down the line. In particular, we suggest embracing a sufficiency mindset, aiming at reducing absolute resource impact and defining what is a good enough service level. After explaining why we need to move beyond efficiency, we explore the concept of sufficiency and identify related challenges. Then, we propose a first version of an edge sufficiency toolkit as a helper for shifting toward a sufficiency mindset. Finally, we illustrate the use of this toolkit in a case study.