What is Communication Latency

Some of the largest global industries that is driving smart city environments are anywhere and anytime health monitoring applications. Smart healthcare systems need to be more preventive and responsive as they deal with sensitive data. Even though cloud computing provides solutions to the smart healthcare applications, the major challenge imposed on cloud computing is how could the centralized traditional cloud computing handle voluminous data. The existing models may encounter problems related to network resource utilization, overheads in network response time, and communication latency. As a solution to these problems, edge-oriented computing has emerged as a new computing paradigm through localized computing. Edge computing expands the compute, storage, and networking capabilities to the edge of the network which will respond to the above-mentioned issues. Based on cloud computing and edge computing, in this chapter an opportunistic edge computing architecture is introduced for smart provisioning of healthcare data.