Performance Analysis of Two Cloud-Based IoT Implementations: Empirical Study

The emergence of the Internet of things (IoT) has generated demand for computation performed at the ‘edge’ of the network. With companies being increasingly challenged to collect and send data collected from IoT devices to the cloud, this increases the need for fog computing. There is also a persistent need to measure the performance of the IoT-Cloud environment while collecting and processing the massive amounts of data arriving from IoT devices. In this paper, we present two cloud-based IoT environments that use the Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT service and discuss their performance. First, we describe the two implementations and the key design decisions. Second, we use nine AWS CloudWatch metrics to show and compare the performance of the two implementations. This work aims to pave the road for a follow-up study on how encryption-based access control would affect the performance of cloud-based IoT environments in order to provide practical solutions.