Bonsai in the Fog: An active learning lab with Fog computing

As for every new technological trend, education of new scientists and engineers will be instrumental in shaping the implementation of the Fog architecture, including software development. In this paper, we describe a 2-hour hands-on lab activity that we designed and run during an M.Sc. course at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa, Italy. The proposed activity is designed to practically (and incrementally) show different deployment models for IoT applications — viz., IoT+Edge, IoT+Cloud and Fog — over a meaningful yet simple application example. In addition to featuring a quick learning curve and limited cost, the proposed activity shows some possible extensions to design other lab sessions.