Managing IoT at the Edge: The Case for BLE Beacons

Managing IoT devices in urban areas is becoming crucial because the majority of people living in cities and the number of deployed IoT devices are steadily increasing. In this paper we present iConfig, an edge-driven platform dedicated to manage IoT devices in smart cities. The goal is to address three major issues in current IoT management: registration, configuration, and maintenance. The core of iConfig is its programmable edge module, which can be deployed across smartphones, wearables, and smart boards to configure and interact with physically proximate IoT devices. Through testbed experiments and usability studies, we reveal the hardship and hidden pitfalls in managing IoT devices, especially for low budget devices like Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons. Our system evaluation shows that iConfig can effectively address the aforementioned IoT management challenges by harnessing the mobile and edge cooperation. To inspire community contributions, we further present concrete use cases to illustrate how iConfig can reduce operational cost and facilitate future edge-centric IoT research.