Performance Evaluation of Open Source IoT Platforms

IoT platforms play a central role in IoT architecture; as they enable the development of services and applications by end users. More than 300 IoT platforms were reported in the literature. IoT platforms vary in their capabilities and features. Accordingly, Selecting between the various platforms can be troublesome. This is particularly true given the fact that no benchmark or systematic evaluation criteria currently exist to evaluate and compare various platforms. To this end, this paper attempts to develop a performance evaluation for open source IoT platforms to reduce the complexity of the selection process. In particular, the paper evaluates the scalability (in terms of throughput and average response time) and stability (in terms of resource utilization and robustness) of the ThingsBoard and SiteWhere platforms. The two platforms are evaluated under heavy load of sensor data readings.

I. Introduction

Recent advances on the Internet of Things(IoT) promise to enable the development of innovative applications in almost all verticals that impact our daily life [1]. A key component in IoT architecture is the so-called IoT platforms (also known as Application Enablement Platform - AEP). Figure 1 shows an abstract architecture of the IoT platforms. The typical platform architecture consists of various components needed to connect, collect, monitor, manage and analyze things data. These functions include connectivity protocols, data storage, device management, data and action processing, data visualization and data analytics.