A Cloud-Based IoT Data Gathering and Processing Platform

The deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices, including sensors, is progressing at a rapid pace. However, the volume of data they generate is becoming difficult to store and process on local platforms. The scalability offered by Cloud computing provides a solution to this problem. Cloud computing provides resources at low cost for its users. However, platform-independent methods of gathering and transmitting sensor data to Clouds are not widely available. This paper presents a Cloud-based smart device data monitoring, gathering and processing platform. It first reviews the state-of-the-art embodied by the existing solutions and discusses their strengths and weaknesses. Informed by the survey analysis, a generic architecture is presented that addresses the identified challenges facing data gathering and processing in this area. Based on use case scenarios, we evaluate and demonstrate the novelty of our proposed platform.

I. Introduction

The real-time control of real-world devices has shown commercial value, for example in entity tracking and control systems. Inspired by this fact, more generalised applications for sensors and smart devices are becoming significant in real world usages. For instance, sensors enable access to remote objects and environmental information providing the raw materials from simple monitoring through to next-generation applications such as smart cities. The gathering, storage and processing of such generated data locally is becoming impractical due to the number of sensors and the volume of data they generate.