Real-time Emergency Response through Performant IoT Architectures

International audienceThis paper describes the design of an Internet of Things (IoT) system for building evacuation. There are two main design decisions for such systems: i) specifying the platform on which the IoT intelligent components should be located; and ii) establishing the level of collaboration among the components. For safety-critical systems, such as evacuation, real-time performance and evacuation time are critical. The approach aims to minimize computational and evacuation delays and uses Queuing Network (QN) models. The approach was tested, by computer simulation, on a real exhibition venue in Alan Turing Building, Italy, that has 34 sets of IoT sensors and actuators. Experiments were performed that tested the effect of segmenting the physical space into different sized virtual cubes. Experiments were also conducted concerning the distribution of the software architecture. The results show that using centralized architectural pattern with a segmentation of the space into large cubes is the only practical solution

Exploring synergies between bottleneck analysis and performance antipatterns

The problem of interpreting the results of performance analysis is quite critical, mostly because the analysis results (i.e. mean values, variances, and probability distributions) are hard to transform into feedback for software engineers that allows to remove performance problems. Approaches aimed at identifying and removing the causes of poor performance in software systems commonly fall in two categories: (i) bottleneck analysis, aimed at identifying overloaded software components and/or hardware resources that affect the whole system performance, and (ii) performance antipat-terns, aimed at detecting and removing common design mistakes that notably induce performance degradation. In this paper, we look for possible synergies between these two categories of approaches in order to empower the performance investigation capabilities. In particular, we aim at showing that the approach combination allows to provide software engineers with broader sets of alternative solutions leading to better performance results. We have explored this research direction in the context of Layered Queueing Network models, and we have considered a case study in the e-commerce domain. After comparing the results achievable with each approach separately, we quantitatively show the benefits of merging bottleneck analysis and performance antipatterns. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM