Design, Development & Evaluation of A Lightweight IoT Platform for Engineering & Scientific Applications

Cloud-based IoT platforms are promising approaches that are becoming the norm to develop intelligent systems and provide solution for rapid IoT applications deployment. However, these multi-tenanted infrastructures imply shared environment data exchange that create challenges to protect the resources from malicious providers. Hence, resources access should be performed through authentication, and authorization, as well as the need to provide valid access in the same host to abstain cross-user accessibility. To alleviate these issues, this paper describes the development of a cloud-based standalone IoT platform named ThingsSentral™. This platform is incorporated with a RESTful API to handle client requests and structurally store raw sensor data in SQL compliant database with dedicated user credentials. Besides, the integrated web SDK exhibits modular infrastructure, which turned this platform into a lightweight PaaS cloud service that is able to run even in embedded devices like Raspberry Pi. The user could create individual credentials, manage projects under corresponding user accounts with data encryption, authentication, and privacy for instruction transfer. The platform shows salient suitability of IoT functionalities for both non-IT and domain experts in engineering and scientific fields.