# Process Automation in an IoT-Fog-Cloud Ecosystem: A Survey and Taxonomy
## 2 IoT and Fog Applications and Architectures
[19] discuss the security of the ecosystem in data integrity and verification when unwanted, suspicious tasks in the ecosystem happen. They study suspicious behavior such as data deletion, data alteration, and data duplication in the ecosystem. Several schemas are suggested for data security, which are signature-based schema, probability-based schema, tag-generation schema, and table-based schema. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [20] provides another insight into security issues in a healthcare domain. The research reviews and analyses various methods and algorithms for data encryption, and data classification in centralized and decentralized ecosystems. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [21] depicts the software simulators of processes in the ecosystem. It counted the examples of software simulators with their advantages and shortages for the Cloud, Fog, and IoT researchers. [PERSON] [22] surveys IoT services such as Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to the users. They analyze several service solutions with different IoT applications and platforms as the criteria. Studying applications in heterogeneous environments, environments with IoT-Fog interaction, environments of IoT-Cloud interactions are among the criteria. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [23] surveys the scheduling in the ecosystem by providing a taxonomy on resource allocation. The study shows the taxonomy based on different metrics such as type of scheduling, techniques of scheduling, pricing, and Quality of Service (QoS)  
All the reviewed papers have studied the characteristics of the communication, network protocols, and security with no concern on automation in the ecosystem. Table 1 shows the reviewed papers with their topic and key aspect. Some of the papers consider a particular IoT application and study the protocols/ecosystem architecture used in the application. For instance, [PERSON] et al. [15] considers an air pollution application and focuses its study on the sensor layer, their calibration, and accuracy. [PERSON] et al. [18], as another example, studies the MQTT protocol in the ecosystem, which is one of the efficient and light-weight protocols in the ecosystem. Two articles illustrate the problem of security for data processing in the ecosystem. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l} \hline \hline
**Paper** & **Topic** & **Key Aspect** \\ \hline [PERSON] et al. [12] & IoT applications & smart city \\ [PERSON] et al. [14] & IoT applications and architectures & Fog layer taxonomy \\ [PERSON] et al. [16] & IoT applications & ecosystem architecture \\ [PERSON] et al. [13] & IoT applications & ecosystem protocols \\ [PERSON] et al. [17] & IoT communication & network protocols \\ [PERSON] et al. [18] & IoT communication & MQTT protocol \\ [PERSON] et al. [15] & air pollution application & IoT sensor layer \\ [PERSON] et al. [19] & IoT data process & security \\ [PERSON] and [PERSON] [20] & IoT healthcare application & security \\ [PERSON] and [PERSON] [21] & IoT simulation & software simulator \\ [PERSON] [22] & IoT application & IoT services \\ [PERSON] and [PERSON] [23] & IoT resource allocation & scheduling \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: The concern and key aspect of the survey papers. The simulation is an important aspect of illustrating task execution and latency because of the cost of execution of real IoT applications in the ecosystem. One paper examines different tools and simulation software programs in the ecosystem. Among the reviewed papers, the taxonomy of IoT applications, the taxonomy of network protocols and the taxonomy of ecosystem architecture, the taxonomy of simulators is covered. The automation of IoT applications and the types of functions and technologies leading to automation is not well covered and studied. Therefore, this survey paper has the motivation to base the study on automation and review the papers with an automation lens, which is one of the most important goals of any IoT application in the ecosystem. Employing automatic mechanisms to resolve IoT challenges requires a survey study.