IoT Management Services: A Comparative Assessment of Popular FIWARE Agents

The concept of Resource Management is related to monitoring and interaction operations with the managed entities. As the Internet of Things (IoT) includes a considerable number of devices, their efficient management is essential. It is also crucial to leverage frameworks to handle the heterogeneous IoT resources, regardless of their technology, to be part of a single ecosystem. FIWARE, a widely used IoT middleware, offers a set of services to tackle such heterogeneity in IoT. Among them, we have Ultralight and Lightweight Machine-to-Machine (LwM2M) IoT agents. However, which one of both should we choose under a given situation? In this paper, we present the results of their comparative assessment in both mobile and stationary scenarios. The study targeted packet loss, delivery delay, and bandwidth occupancy widely adopted metrics in networking. We show that network conditions may have a substantial impact on the performance of any of the services. Moreover, we identified several implementation-related issues which dramatically affect the analyzed performance.