A mobility analytics framework for Internet of Things

Abstract

In a mobile IoT system, IoT devices are located in a moving vehicle such as in a car, in a mobile robot or in an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). An IoT Gateway aggregates data from various IoT devices located in a moving vehicle and its surroundings. This GW could also be located in the vehicle itself. We consider infrastructure as well as ad-hoc mode scenarios here. In infrastructure mode, this mobile IoT GW can communicate with multiple analytics servers to run distributed analytics applications. In ad-hoc mode scenarios, internet connectivity is not assured and analytics applications may need to be run on one or more Gateway nodes. In both these modes, IoT analytics server gets variety of parameters providing contextual, mobility, performance and other type of information from IoT GW nodes and end-devices. In this paper, we first enhance an existing mobility analytics framework to do mobility analytics of mobile IoT GW nodes (along with IoT end-devices). We also analyze different types of analytics applications in this framework. This framework allows an IoT operator or end-user to take variety of decisions in a unified way in infrastructure mode of operation. We also present our initial work for ad-hoc mode of operation where one or more IoT Gateway nodes are involved in carrying out analytics related processing.