Architecture and measured characteristics of a cloud based internet of things

The Internet of Things (IoT) many be thought of as the availability of physical objects, or devices, on the Internet [1]. Given such an arrangement it is possible to access sensor data and control actuators remotely. Furthermore such data may be combined with data from other sources - e.g. with data that is contained in the Web - or operated on by cloud based services to create applications far richer than can be provided by isolated embedded systems [2,3]. This is the vision of the Internet of Things. We present a cloud-compatible open source controller and an extensible API, hereafter referred to as `IoTCloud', which enables developers to create scalable high performance IoT and sensor-centric applications. The IoTCloud software is written in Java and built on popular open source packages such as Apache Active MQ [4] and JBoss Netty [5]. We present an overview of the IoT Cloud architecture and describe its developer API. Next we introduce the FutureGrid - a geographically distributed and heterogeneous cloud test-bed [6,7] - used in our experiments. Our preliminary results indicate that a distributed cloud infrastructure like the FutureGrid coupled with our flexible IoTCloud framework is an environment suitable for the study and development of IoT and sensor-centric applications. We also report on our initial study of certain measured characteristics of an IoTCloud application running on the FutureGrid. We conclude by inviting interested parties to use the IoTCloud to create their own IoT applications or contribute to its further development.