Uncovering Effective Roles and Tasks for Fog Systems.

Fog computing has evolved as a promising paradigm to overcome challenges of edge and cloud computing for use cases such as autonomous driving and virtual reality demanding low latency and the handling of large data loads. The design of fog systems between the cloud and edge opens a large space of possible tasks that fog nodes can take, such as (pre-)processing data or providing advanced security measures for networks. The question remains which tasks a fog system should effectively fulfill to meet the objectives of a specific use case and its requirements. We address this question by developing a hierarchy of standardized tasks and roles (defined as effective sets of recurring tasks for fog systems) based on the analyses of implemented and proposed fog systems from 105 research articles. Researchers and practitioners can leverage this hierarchy to select effective fog roles for use cases and mitigate conceptual ambiguity related to fog computing.