Edge device
A device located near the data source that processes, filters or analyzes data locally before sending results onward, rather than forwarding raw data to the cloud.
An edge device does computing where the data is produced instead of shipping everything to a data center. The term spans a range: a gateway that aggregates sensor traffic, a camera with a neural accelerator classifying images on board. What they share is a microprocessor-class platform with enough memory to run an operating system, containers and often a machine-learning model.
The reasons to process at the edge are latency, bandwidth, resilience and privacy: a quality-inspection system cannot wait for a cloud round trip, a wind farm cannot stream raw vibration data over satellite, and a factory must keep running when the internet drops. The costs are hardware to buy and maintain in the field, and software that must be deployed and updated across many sites. Edge computing explained covers the architecture in depth.
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