## 8 Challenges of EC-Based IoT  
As we discussed, there are numerous benefits to integrating edge computing to assist IoT. In this section, we discuss the main challenges of EC-based IoT. 1. _System integration_: a significant challenge in the edge computing environment is supporting various kinds of IoT devices and different service demands. Edge computing is a heterogeneous system and combines various platforms, network topologies, and servers. Therefore, programming and managing resources and data for diverse applications running on varying and heterogeneous platforms in different locations would be difficult. Another challenge is deploying and managing the huge number of server-side programs on the edge nodes. In addition, since various storage servers are running with various operating systems, file naming, resource allocation, file reliability management, etc., will be another challenge. Moreover, the naming of data resources becomes another big challenge because of the massive number of IoT devices generating and uploading data at the same time. 2. _Resource management_: because of decentralized resources in edge computing, the significant heterogeneity of service providers, devices, and applications creates substantial complexity. 3. _Security and privacy_: edge computing consists of a complex interweaving of multiple and varied technologies (peer-to-peer systems, wireless networks, virtualization, etc.) and adopting a comprehensive, integrated system to safeguard and manage each technology platform and the system as a whole is required. The security and privacy of distributed structures are very challenging. With respect to privacy, privacy-sensitive information associated with end users could be exploited during data processing at the edge. With respect to security, one of the security problems of edge computing is authenticating gateways on different levels. Different edge nodes are managed by different owners, so deploying an equivalent security strategy throughout would be difficult. Security in data sharing and data transmission processes are also other key challenges for EC-based IoT. To be able to perform many tasks with limited resources and a huge number of edge devices, multiple devices should collaborate, and data need to be shared securely between edge devices. In EC-based IoT, massive data are generated by numerous sensors and devices, and different third-party suppliers provide all the storage. User data are outsourced to those storage suppliers, whose storage devices are deployed at the edge of the network and located at many different physical addresses. This increases the risk of attacks for several reasons: first, ensuring data integrity is difficult; the data are separated into many parts and are stored across different storage locations, so it is easy to lose data packets or store incorrect data. Second, unauthorized users or adversaries may modify or abuse the uploaded data in storage, which will lead to data leakage and other privacy issues. Another important security challenge in EC-based IoT is maintaining security and privacy in uploading computational tasks to edge computation nodes. Blockchain can provide security for edge data sharing to some extent. However, since the computing resources of edge devices are usually limited, the design and optimization of edge IoT architecture based on blockchain are a great challenge, and more attention should be paid to the direction of the edge IoT based on blockchain. 4. _Advanced communication_: with advances in communication technologies of future 5G cellular networks, including ultradense networks (UDNs), massive multiple input and multiple output (MIMO), and millimeter-wave, further progress in edge computing becomes inevitable with the integration of these technologies. The challenges to applying 5G, as the next generation communication technology, in edge computing in IoT focus on QoS, nodes management, and network slicing. The QoS standards and schemes are different in 5G, and edge computing and common problems need to be considered.