Analyzing IoT, fog and cloud environments using real sensor data

Abstract

There is a growing number of communicating devices joining the Internet, and we will soon face a world of a distributed computing environment with interconnected smart devices. Cloud-based systems have also started to dominate the Internet space, with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. In spite of the huge developments in the connectivity of devices, there is still much to do in areas such as device connectivity, communication protocols, latency, Internet bandwidth, inter-operability. In this context, Fog Computing, the latest paradigm, can come to rescue to improve the service quality by keeping and processing the data close to the user. This suggests that IoT applications can be supported by Cloud and Fog technologies to aid in the data management tasks. Besides, in many real-world solutions, we need to use simulations to investigate the inner workings of complex ICT systems. In the current presentation, our goal is to provide means to develop efficient data management algorithms in a simulation environment. In this chapter, we first analyze sensor data formats in the context of smart cities and develop a data retrieval tool for gathering and filtering the considered open datasets. We analyze three smart city initiatives that met our criteria and publish open data produced by the IoT sensors and devices. Then, we discuss how IoT data could be made available via the use of this tool for simulation environments. We also exemplify its utilization in an open-source IoT device simulator.