  There is an ever-growing race between what novel applications demand from the
infrastructure and what the continuous technological breakthroughs bring in.
Especially after the proliferation of smart devices and diverse IoT
requirements, we observe the dominance of cutting-edge applications with
ever-increased user expectations in terms of mobility, pervasiveness, and
real-time response. Over the years, to meet the requirements of those
applications, cloud computing provides the necessary capacity for computation,
while edge computing ensures low latency. However, these two essential
solutions would be insufficient for the next-generation applications since
computational and communicational bottlenecks are inevitable due to the highly
dynamic load. Therefore, a 3D networking structure using different air layers
including Low Altitude Platforms, High Altitude Platforms, and Low Earth Orbits
in a harmonized manner for both urban and rural areas should be applied to
satisfy the requirements of the dynamic environment. In this perspective, we
put forward a novel, next-generation paradigm called Air Computing that
presents a dynamic, responsive, and high-resolution computation and
communication environment for all spectrum of applications using the 6G
Wireless Networks as the fundamental communication system. In this survey, we
define the components of air computing, investigate its architecture in detail,
and discuss its essential use cases and the advantages it brings for
next-generation application scenarios. We provide a detailed and technical
overview of the benefits and challenges of air computing as a novel paradigm
and spot the important future research directions.
