18 July 2018

The OpenFog Consortium’s reference architecture has been adopted as an official standard by the IEEE Standards Association.

Known as IEEE 1934, the new standard relies on the reference architecture as a universal technical framework that enables the data-intensive requirements of the IoT, 5G and AI applications.

Fog computing is a system-level horizontal architecture that distributes computing, storage, control and networking resources and services anywhere along the cloud-to-things continuum. It is said to enable services and applications to be distributed closer to the data-producing sources, and extends from the ‘things’, over the network edges, through the cloud and across multiple protocol layers. 

The OpenFog Consortium was founded more than two years ago to accelerate adoption of fog computing through an open, interoperable architecture. 

Its reference architecture was released in February 2017 and is based on eight core technical principles (termed ‘pillars’) which represent the key attributes that a system needs to encompass to be defined as ‘OpenFog’. These include: security, scalability, openness, autonomy, RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability), agility, hierarchy and programmability.

OpenFog Consortium chairman Helder Antunes says: “We now have an industry-backed and supported blueprint that will supercharge the development of new applications and business models made possible through fog computing. This is a significant milestone for OpenFog and a monumental inflection point for those companies and industries that will benefit from the ensuing innovation and market growth made possible by the standard.”