Performance evaluation of scalable and distributed iot platforms for smart regions

• Main Author: Araujo Soto, Víctor Estuardo
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Luleå tekniska universitet, Datavetenskap 2017
• Subjects: IOT; performance; FIWARE; Internet of Things; QoS; testbed; monitoring; Computer Systems; Datorsystem
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-65343

As the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes a reality, thousands of devices will beconnected to IoT platforms in smart cities and regions. These devices will actively send dataupdates to cloud-based platforms, as part of smart applications in domains like healthcare, trafficand pollution monitoring. Therefore, it is important to study the ability of modern IoT systemsto handle high rates of data updates coming from devices. In this work we evaluated the per-formance of components of the Internet of Things Services Enablement Architecture of theEuropean initiative FIWARE. We developed a testbed that is able to inject data updates usingMQTT and the CoAP-based Lightweight M2M protocols, simulating large scale IoT deploy-ments. Our extensive tests considered the vertical and horizontal scalability of the componentsof the platform. Our results found the limits of the components when handling the load, and thescaling strategies that should be targeted by implementers. We found that vertical scaling is notan effective strategy in comparison to the gains achieved by horizontally scaling the databaselayer. We reflect about the load testing methodology for IoT systems, the scalability needs ofdifferent layers and conclude with future challenges in this topic.