Design and evaluation of a scalable Internet of Things backend for smart ports

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, when adequately integrated, cater for logistics optimisation and operations' environmental impact monitoring, both key aspects for today's EU ports management. This article presents Obelisk, a scalable and multi‐tenant cloud‐based IoT integration platform used in the EU H2020 PortForward project. The landscape of IoT protocols being particularly fragmented, the first role of Obelisk is to provide uniform access to data originating from a myriad of devices and protocols. Interoperability is achieved through adapters that provide flexibility and evolvability in protocol and format mapping. Additionally, due to ports operating in a hub model with various interacting actors, a second role of Obelisk is to secure access to data. This is achieved through encryption and isolation for data transport and processing, respectively, while user access control is ensured through authentication and authorisation standards. Finally, as ports IoTisation will further evolve, a third need for Obelisk is to scale with the data volumes it must ingest and process. Platform scalability is achieved by means of a reactive micro‐services based design. Those three essential characteristics are detailed in this article with a specific focus on how to achieve IoT data platform scalability. By means of an air quality monitoring use‐case deployed in the city of Antwerp, the scalability of the platform is evaluated. The evaluation shows that the proposed reactive micro‐service based design allows for horizontal scaling of the platform as well as for logarithmic time complexity of its service time.

Service Relationship Orchestration: Lessons Learned From Running Large Scale Smart City Platforms on Kubernetes

“…As with any smart cities project, this creates a complex environment spanning multiple management domains which has to support multiple tenants with varying levels of collaboration between them. At the core of this setup, shown in Figure 1, sits Obelisk [28] [29]; a platform for building scalable applications on IoT centric time series data. Obelisk is specifically built to support the heterogeneous nature of smart cities.…”

“…Obelisk supports this using deeply integrated multi-tenant isolation with granular access controls in the entire architecture. The Obelisk and City of Things projects are explained in much more detail in previous work [28] [1].…”

A Complete Software Stack for IoT Time-Series Analysis that Combines Semantics and Machine Learning—Lessons Learned from the Dyversify Project

“…As ingestion service, we use Obelisk [40,41], a scalable platform for building applications on IoT-centric time-series data that was developed in-house by Ghent University and imec in the scope of several IoT projects [42,43]. Obelisk provides a stateless HTTP API for storing and retrieving data and uses authentication based on OpenID and OAuth 2.0.…”

Enabling and Leveraging AI in the Intelligent Edge: A Review of Current Trends and Future Directions

“…what TensorFlow did for neural networks) are mostly absent. Existing Smart City frameworks such as FiWare [161] and Obelisk [162] are mostly cloud-based, offering a broad support of IoT communication protocols and scalable data processing, but do not explicitly contain edge-oriented intelligent features. Ongoing IEEE standardization efforts, as presented in Section III-E, are very likely to significantly improve this situation in the near future.…”