Edge–Cloud Orchestration for IoT Services: Technologies, Architectures, and Research Directions

The advent of 6G networks and the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) are revolutionizing the telecommunication sector, integrating edge-cloud systems with vast amounts of data from IoT and AI techniques. These advancements make these systems essential in managing and delivering a multitude of services, offered by smart cities and industrial domains, being just a few among the many possible application scenarios. Specifically, this shift introduces complexities in orchestrating services and managing available resources while addressing challenges such as reducing latency, growing bandwidth, ensuring trust, and integrating different technologies. In this sense, this review explores the recent approaches of the state of the art focused on service orchestration in IoT edge-cloud environments, concentrating on architectures and methodologies that enable resource allocation and service management. Furthermore, it examines platforms for orchestration development, highlighting their characteristics and contributions. Finally, emerging concerns such as network topology and trust, which previous surveys have often overlooked, are discussed together with the most relevant research directions.