Navigating the Edge–Cloud Continuum: A State-of-Practice Survey

The Edge Cloud Continuum has come up as a promising computing paradigm bringing together the strengths of edge and cloud infrastructures to keep up with the growing demands of modern IoT and latency sensitive applications [1], [2]. This survey went through recent advancements in architecture, resource orchestration, task offloading, security and application domains while also bringing out the role played by enabling technologies such as AI, MEC and 5G/6G networks. Through a comparative analysis of existing studies, key research gaps were identified including interoperability, intelligent resource management, security and energy efficiency. To tackle these challenges a conceptual methodology made up of four integrated methods was proposed to support efficient data processing and workload distribution across the continuum. Going ahead, developments in artificial intelligence, federated learning, digital twins and sustainable computing are expected to strengthen this paradigm even more [15], [18]. All in all the Edge Cloud Continuum lays down a strong foundation for building scalable, secure and intelligent distributed computing systems that can meet the evolving requirements of next generation digital applications.

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