Distributed Computing for the Internet of Things Using IoT Hubs

The vast amount of data created in the world today requires an unprecedented amount of processing power to be turned into valuable information. Importantly, more and more of this data is created on the edges of the Internet, where small computers, capable of sensing and controlling their environments, are producing it. Traditionally these so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been utilized as sources of data or as control devices, and their rising computing capabilities have not yet been harnessed for data processing. Also, the middleware systems that are created to manage these IoT resources have heterogeneous APIs, and thus cannot communicate with each other in a standardized way. To address these issues, the IoT Hub framework was created. It provides a RESTful API for standardized communication, and includes an execution engine for distributed task processing on the IoT resources. A thorough experimental evaluation shows that the IoT Hub platform can considerably lower the execution time of a task in a distributed IoT environment with resource constrained devices. When compared to theoretical benchmark values, the platform scales well and can effectively utilize dozens of IoT resources for parallel processing