Cayley-Abels graphs: Local and global perspectives

We give an introduction to the Cayley-Abels graph for a totally disconnected, locally compact (tdlc) group. It is a generalization of the Cayley graph. We illustrate that on the one hand, Cayley-Abels graphs are useful tools to extend concepts concerning finitely generated groups to compactly generated, tdlc groups and on the other hand, they can be used to investigate properties that, for finitely generated groups, are trivial.