The number of connected Internet of Things sensors and devices will exceed 50 billion by 2022, according to a new market forecast by Juniper Research.

That will be a growth rate of 140% over the next four years, an increase from an estimated 21 billion connected devices this year.

The growth will be driven by edge computing services, the processing of data away from the cloud and closer to the source, according to Juniper. The rise in edge computing will be essential for devices to reach scale and made possible by reduced bandwidth requirements and faster application response times.

North America, West Europe and the Far East and China will be the core markets for consumer IoT over the next four years and no region will have fewer than 1 billion installed devices by that time, according to the forecast. The main competitors for large public cloud services are Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung and Google.