IoT Manager: a Case Study of the Design and Implementation of an Open Source IoT Platform

IoT represents one of the most insightful trends concerning ICT. As we assist to a growing diffusion of heterogeneous sensor networks deployed all over urban areas, one of the main concerns is to provide the community with versatile and easy-to-go frameworks capable to serve and to organize data collected by these sensors. However, as we may notice, the world largest information technology companies tend to release user friendly IoT platforms and services avoiding to reveal the know-how concerning design and implementation details of these products. As a consequence of this business strategy, a common trend for universities and other teaching institutions is to use these mainstream IoT platforms during their classes in a 'as a service' fashion, omitting to unveil technical details and design strategies these platforms rely on. In this paper, we present IoT Manager, a general framework designed for sensor networks management which was completely designed and implemented within the University of Bologna. Our main aim is to provide the scientific community with a detailed implementation strategy concerning a specific IoT platform in order to disseminate such topics in a more precise and understandable way, both for research and teaching purposes.