Distributed spatial indexing for the Internet of Things data management

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a new enabler for collecting real-world observation and measurement data from the physical world. The IoT allows objects with sensing and network capabilities (i.e. Things and devices) to communicate with one another and with other resources (e.g. services) on the digital world. The heterogeneity, dynamicity and ad-hoc nature of underlying data, and services published by most of IoT resources make accessing and processing the data and services a challenging task. The IoT demands distributed, scalable, and efficient indexing solutions for large-scale distributed IoT networks. We describe a novel distributed indexing approach for IoT resources and their published data. The index structure is constructed by encoding the locations of IoT resources into geohashes and then building a quadtree on the minimum bounding box of the geohash representations. This allows to aggregate resources with similar geohashes and reduce the size of the index. We have evaluated our proposed solution on a large-scale dataset and our results show that the proposed approach can efficiently index and enable discovery of the IoT resources with 65% better response time than a centralised approach and with a high success rate (around 90% in the first few attempts).