From IoT big data to IoT big services

The large-scale deployments of Internet of Things (IoT) systems have introduced several new challenges in terms of processing their data. The massive amount of IoT-generated data requires design solutions to speed up data processing, scale up with the data volume and improve data adaptability and extensibility. Beyond existing techniques for IoT data collection, filtering, and analytics, innovative service computing technologies are required for provisioning data-centric and scalable IoT services. This paper presents a service-oriented design model and framework for realizing scalable and efficient acquisition, processing and integration of data-centric IoT services. In this approach, data-centric IoT services are organized in a service integrating tree structure, adhering to the architecture of many large-scale IoT systems, including recent fog-based IoT computing models. A service node in the tree is called a Big Service and acts as an integrator, collecting data from lower level Big Services, processing them, and delivering the result to higher level IoT Big Services. The service tree thereby encapsulates required data processing functions in a hierarchical manner in order to achieve scalable and real-time data collection and processing. We have implemented the IoT Big Services framework leveraging a popular cloud-based service and data platform called Firebase, and evaluated its performance in terms of real-time requirements.