In a future IoT-dominated environment the majority of data will be produced at the edge, which may be moved to the network core. We argue that this reverses today’s “core-to-edge” data flow to an “edge-to-core” model and puts severe stress on edge access/cellular links. In this paper, we propose a data-centric communication approach which treats storage and wire the same as far as their ability to supply the requested data is concerned. Given that storage is cheaper to provide and scales better than wires, we argue for enhancing network connectivity with local storage services (e.g., in WiFi Access Points, or similar) at the edge of the network. Such local storage services can be used to buffer IoT and user-generated data at the edge, prior to data-cloud synchronization.
