Edge-Cloud Orchestration Patents: Top Companies & Filing Trends 2026
- 50.2% concentration. The top 5 ranked assignees hold 124 of the 247 records in scope — half the field sits with a handful of filers.
- Filings up 107%. Annual filings rose from 15 in 2021 to 31 in 2024, with a peak of 53 records in 2022.
- Two classes dominate. G06F and H04L each appear on more than half of all 247 records, showing where orchestration claims are concentrated versus where AI and wireless overlap is still thin.
Filing growth compares 2021 (15 records) with 2024 (31) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 247 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This dataset tracks 247 published records matching edge-cloud orchestration, workload scheduling and MEC coordination search terms, spanning filings from 2015 through the 2026-07-31 cut-off. It captures the intersection of two claim types: systems that decide where a workload runs — edge node, MEC gateway, or central cloud — and the orchestration logic that moves it there under changing network or resource conditions. Receiving-office data shows the United States as the dominant filing venue, with India, WIPO/PCT and Europe forming a substantial secondary tier.
Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the most recent one to two years in any trend understate actual filing activity — 2024 is the last year that can be read as complete, and the +107% growth figure from 2021 to 2024 reflects that boundary.
Filing trends and technology composition
The 247 records in scope break down by filing year and by IPC subclass, giving two independent views of where activity sits: momentum over time, and where claims are technically anchored.
A decade of acceleration, with a 2022 peak
Filings grew from 5 in 2017 to a peak of 53 in 2022, before settling to 31 in 2024 — still more than double the 2021 level of 15. Readings from 2025 and 2026 are still filling in and should not be read as a slowdown.
G06F and H04L anchor the field
G06F (electric digital data processing) appears on 61.9% of the 247 records and H04L (digital information transmission) on 58.7%, confirming that most orchestration claims are framed as computing-and-networking hybrids rather than pure wireless-protocol claims. G06N (AI-based computing) at 19.4% and H04W (wireless networks) at 19.0% mark the two areas of secondary, but still meaningful, overlap.
Shares are the percentage of the 247 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Edge Computing — Edge–Cloud Workload Orchestration Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about edge computing — edge–cloud workload orchestration patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaRepresentative filing and most-cited prior art
US12010510B2 — Systems and methods for secure virtualized base station orchestration
The method secures virtualized wireless base station orchestration by chaining certificate issuance from a global CA through a sub-CA at the edge cloud node cluster, establishing an IPsec tunnel to orchestration functions in the cloud, and using those functions to deploy VNF-based base station entities on the node, each with its own certificate and private key.Filed by Outdoor Wireless Networks LLC, published 2024-06-11.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20180041905A1 | Ultra-broadband virtualized telecom and internet | 328 |
| 2 | US20180343567A1 | Private multefire network with SDR-based massive MIMO, multefire and network slicing | 311 |
| 3 | US20200310394A1 | Distributed software-defined industrial systems | 218 |
| 4 | US20220197773A1 | Automated resource management for distributed computing | 161 |
| 5 | US20200050494A1 | Microservice provision and management | 153 |
| 6 | US20200296155A1 | Method, system and product to implement deterministic on-boarding and scheduling of virtualized workloads for… | 137 |
| 7 | US20180376338A1 | SDR-based massive MIMO with v-ran cloud architecture and SDN-based network slicing | 130 |
| 8 | US20200167196A1 | Methods and apparatus to execute a workload in an edge environment | 127 |
| 9 | US20190041824A1 | Scalable edge compute in a distributed control environment | 125 |
| 10 | US20190041830A1 | Self-descriptive orchestratable modules in software-defined industrial systems | 116 |
Citation counts favour older records inside this searched corpus and should be read as a signal of influence, not current relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three patterns stand out once filing trend, technology composition and assignee concentration are read together.
Half the field sits with a handful of filers
The top 5 ranked assignees account for 124 of the 247 records in scope, and the top 10 extend that to 65.6%. A new entrant is filing into a field where half the claim space is already staked by a small group, with a long tail of single or few-filing entities behind them.
Growth accelerated then plateaued at a higher base
Annual filings rose from 15 in 2021 to 31 in 2024, after a 2022 peak of 53. The trajectory shows sustained interest through 2024 rather than a single filing spike, even as some named leaders show flat or declining year-over-year counts individually.
Compute and transmission claims dominate over AI framing
G06F and H04L each cover more than half of the 247 records, while G06N (AI-based computing) sits at 19.4%. Claims that frame orchestration primarily as an AI-scheduling problem are still a minority position relative to compute- and transport-centric framings.
US filing leads by a wide margin, India a distant second
Of the receiving offices recorded, the United States accounts for 141 records, with India at 42, WIPO/PCT at 24 and Europe at 19. A US-first filing strategy remains the norm in this space, with India emerging as the clearest secondary venue.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to edge computing — edge–cloud workload orchestration patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and where the room to move sits
The ranked leaders combine established networking and cloud infrastructure vendors with wireless-chipset and enterprise-software players. Co-assignee pairs point to specific inventor teams working repeatedly together within the leading filers.
A single filer holds a clear lead
The top-ranked assignee holds 66 records, well ahead of fifth place at 13 and tenth place at 7 — a steep drop-off that marks this as a concentrated field at the very top even as the tail extends across 100 ranked companies.
Inventor teams cluster inside leading filers
Ten co-assignee pairs appear in the dataset, with the strongest pairing co-credited on 9 records and a second pairing on 8. This points to stable internal teams driving a meaningful share of one leading filer's output rather than diffuse individual inventorship.
Some established filers have gone quiet in the latest year
Several assignees that filed in prior years show zero records in the latest year, including two with a recorded -100% year-over-year change. Given the 18-month publication lag, this reflects incomplete recent data as much as any actual pullback.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Qualcomm Incorporated | 1 | -50% |
| Intel Corporation | 0 | — |
| VMware, Inc. | 0 | — |
| International Business Machines Corporation | 0 | -100% |
| NxGen Partners IP, LLC | 0 | — |
| Zscaler, Inc. | 0 | -100% |
| CommScope Technologies LLC | 0 | — |
| SMITH NED M | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to specific next steps depending on whether the goal is freedom-to-operate, portfolio strategy or identifying acquisition targets.
Run a freedom-to-operate check against the top 5
With 50.2% of records held by five assignees, any new filing in edge-cloud orchestration should be checked against that concentrated claim set before drafting.
Explore assignee claims in EurekaMap the under-claimed branches to your roadmap
G05B, H04J and G06Q overlaps sit well below the G06F/H04L core and may offer more open claim space for specific sub-applications.
Explore white space in EurekaTrack the 2024–2026 filing window as it fills in
Publication lag means 2025-2026 figures will keep rising; revisit the trend once more records post to confirm whether 2022's peak was cyclical.
Set up trend tracking in EurekaCommon questions about this landscape
The dataset ranks 100 assignees by record count, with the leading filer holding 66 of the 247 records in scope — far ahead of fifth place at 13 and tenth place at 7. The top 5 combined account for 50.2% of all records and the top 10 for 65.6%, so the field is concentrated at the top with a long tail of single- or few-filing entrants behind the leaders. Any competitive analysis should treat the top 5 as the primary blocking risk rather than spreading attention evenly across all 100 ranked names.
Filings rose from 5 records in 2017 to a peak of 53 in 2022, and from 15 in 2021 to 31 in 2024 — a 107% increase over that three-year span. Because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 figures in the underlying data are still incomplete and should not be read as a decline. Based on the complete years through 2024, filing activity has more than doubled since 2021 and remains well above pre-2020 levels.
Records are classified predominantly under G06F (electric digital data processing, 61.9% of the 247 records) and H04L (digital information transmission, 58.7%), indicating that most claims combine compute-management logic with network transport mechanics. Secondary classes include G06N (AI-based computing, 19.4%) and H04W (wireless networks, 19.0%), showing meaningful but smaller overlap with machine-learning-driven scheduling and cellular/MEC-specific claims. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC codes, these shares sum to more than 100% and should be read as overlapping technical facets rather than mutually exclusive categories.
The IPC composition shows G05B (control and regulating systems, 5.7% of records), H04J (multiplex communication, 3.2%) and G06Q (business/commerce data processing, 4.9%) sitting well below the dominant G06F/H04L core. That gap suggests industrial control-loop orchestration, multiplex-channel-aware scheduling and business-rule-driven workload placement are comparatively under-claimed relative to general compute-and-transport orchestration. A first claim in these areas would need to tie the specific control, multiplexing or business-logic mechanism directly to the edge-cloud placement decision to differentiate from the dense core.
Not necessarily. Citation counts inside a searched corpus like this one favour older records simply because they have had more time to accumulate citations, so the most-cited records in this dataset skew toward earlier publications rather than the most current technical approaches. They are useful as a signal of historical influence on how the field's claim language developed, but a freedom-to-operate or white-space analysis should weight recent filing activity and IPC composition at least as heavily as raw citation counts.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.