With the increasing popularity of the Internet of Things and massive Machine Type Communication technologies, the number of connected devices is rising. However, although enabling valuable effects to our lives, bandwidth and latency constraints challenge Cloud processing of their associated data amounts. A promising solution to these challenges is the combination of Edge and approximate computing techniques that allows for data processing nearer to the user. This article aims to survey the potential benefits of these paradigms’ intersection. We provide a state-of-the-art review of circuit-level and architecture-level hardware techniques and popular applications. We also outline essential future research directions.

随着物联网和海量机器类型通信技术的日益普及，连接设备的数量不断增加。然而，尽管对我们的生活产生了有价值的影响，但带宽和延迟限制对相关数据量的云处理提出了挑战。应对这些挑战的一个有前途的解决方案是边缘计算和近似计算技术的结合，允许在更接近用户的地方进行数据处理。本文旨在调查这些范式交叉的潜在好处。我们对电路级和架构级硬件技术和流行应用程序进行了最先进的审查。我们还概述了重要的未来研究方向。