Performance Evaluation of IoT Middleware through Multicriteria Decision-Making

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept of connecting everything to the Internet is ambitious and disruptive. Its market is promising and data centric, which is stored and processed in a software known as IoT middleware. However, a plethora of middleware solutions is available and most of the comparisons presented in the literature are qualitative, which is insufficient when choosing a solution for a real scenario. Moreover, the few quantitative comparisons that are available in the literature can only determine the best solution in separated given categories. This paper complements the conclusions of a quantitative comparison study that is available in the literature through a comparison of five middleware solutions across five different scenarios. Such conclusions were possible through PROMETHEE, a multicriteria decision-making method (MCDM). This study also confirms that best solution depends on which criteria are prioritized in a given scenario. The outcome was analyzed in detail and it was concluded that MCDMs are useful when choosing the best middleware platform to deploy in a given IoT solution. Orion (a Fiware project), InatelPlat, and Sitewhere are the platforms that performed better in the study.