Platforms and Protocols for the Internet of Things

Building a general architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT) is a very complex task, exacerbated by the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we identify the main blocks of a generic IoT architecture, describing their features and requirements, and analyze the most common approaches proposed in the literature for each block. In particular, we compare three of the most important communication technologies for IoT purposes, i.e., REST, MQTT, and AMQP, and we also analyze three IoT platforms: openHAB, Sentilo, and Parse. The analysis will prove the importance of adopting an integrated approach that jointly addresses several issues and is able to flexibly accommodate the requirements of the various elements of the system. We also discuss a use case which illustrates the design challenges and the choices to make when selecting which protocols and technologies to use

A survey of communication protocols for internet of things and related challenges of fog and cloud computing integration

The fast increment in the number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices is accelerating the research on new solutions to make cloud services scalable. In this context, the novel concept of fog computing as well as the combined fog-to-cloud computing paradigm is becoming essential to decentralize the cloud, while bringing the services closer to the end-system. This article surveys e application layer communication protocols to fulfill the IoT communication requirements, and their potential for implementation in fog- and cloud-based IoT systems. To this end, the article first briefly presents potential protocol candidates, including request-reply and publish-subscribe protocols. After that, the article surveys these protocols based on their main characteristics, as well as the main performance issues, including latency, energy consumption, and network throughput. These findings are thereafter used to place the protocols in each segment of the system (IoT, fog, cloud), and thus opens up the discussion on their choice, interoperability, and wider system integration. The survey is expected to be useful to system architects and protocol designers when choosing the communication protocols in an integrated IoT-to-fog-to-cloud system architecture.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Web services approach for ambient assisted living in mobile environments

Web services appeared as a promising technology for Web environments independent of technologies, services, and applications. First, a performance comparison study between the two most used Web service architectures, SOAP and REST, is presented, considering messages exchange between clients and a server. Based on this study, the REST architecture was chosen to deploy the system because it gets better results compared to SOAP architecture. Currently, there are some issues related with this approach that should be studied. For instance, if massive quantities of data are sent to databases it can influence significantly the performance of the whole system. The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMPQ) appears as a promising solution to address this problem. Then, in order to evaluate the performance of this approach, this work presents a performance evaluation and a comparison study of RESTful Web services and the AMQP Protocol considering exchanging messages between clients and a server. The study is based on the averaged exchanged messages for a certain period of time. It was observed and concluded that, for large quantities of messages exchange, the best results comes from the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) was addressed in this work because it is a similar protocol to AMQP but it can be used by mobile devices with a processing capacity smallest unlike the AMQP that needs greater processing capacity. These studies are performed in the context of Ambient Assisted Living environments, since the work was applied to this topic in order to experiment the effectiveness and evaluate the performance of these protocols in this scenario