Standard IEEE 1934, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ first official standard for so-called “fog computing,” has officially received a reference architecture: OpenFog.

Sitting somewhere beyond cloud computing, fog computing is a horizontal architecture designed to distribute resources – from computing power to storage – anywhere between the clouds at the top and embedded devices at the bottom. The OpenFog Consortium, founded two years ago, has been working to develop standards for fog computing – and has now been validated in the form of IEEE 1934.

“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,” claims Helder Antunes, chair of the OpenFog Consortium and senior director at Cisco, of OpenFog’s adoption in the IEEE 1934 standard. “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.”

“The reference architecture provided a solid, high-level foundation for the development of fog computing standards,” adds John Zao, chair of the IEEE Standards Working Group on Fog Computing & Networking Architecture Framework. “The OpenFog technical committee and the IEEE standards committee worked closely during this process and benefited from the collaboration and synergies that developed. We’re very pleased with the results of this standards effort.”

More information on OpenFog can be found on the official website, while IEEE 1934 has been published as a draft standard by the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA).