Internet of Things as a Service (iTaaS): Challenges and solutions for management of sensor data on the cloud and the fog

Abstract

Building upon cloud, IoT and smart sensors technologies we design and develop an IoT as a Service (iTaaS) framework, that transforms a user's mobile device (e.g. a smart phone) to an IoT gateway which allows for fast and efficient data streams transmission to the cloud. We develop a two-fold solution, based on micro-services for the IoT (users’ smart devices) and the cloud side (back-end services). iTaaS includes configurations for (a) the IoT side to support data collection from IoT devices to a gateway on a real time basis and, (b) the cloud back-end side to support data sharing, storage and processing. iTaaS provides the technology foreground to enable immediate application deployments in the domain of interest. An obvious and promising implementation of this technology is e-Health and remote health monitoring. As a proof of concept we implement a real time remote patient monitoring system that integrates the proposed framework and uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) pulse oximeter and heart rate monitoring sensing devices. The experimental analysis shows fast data collection, as (for our experimental setup) data is transmitted from the IoT side (i.e. the gateway) to the cloud in less than 130 ms. We also stress the back-end system with high user concurrency (e.g. with 40 users per second) and high data streams (e.g. 240 data records per second) and we show that the requests are executed at around 1 s, a number that signifies a satisfactory performance by considering the number of requests, the network latency and the relatively small size of the Virtual Machines implementing services on the cloud (2 GB RAM, 1 CPU and 20 GB hard disk size).