Designing a cloud tier for the IoT platform EMULSION

This paper presents some design aspects of the cloud tier of a generic multi-service cloud-based IoT operational platform EMULSION, which is developed as a non-expensive IoT platform primarily to serve the needs of small and medium business enterprises (SMEs). The EMULSION is a representative of the new horizontal type, next-generation, IoT platforms that come as a replacement of the existing vertical type platforms. The architectural design and main characteristics of the platform are presented and its multi-tiered structure is explained with particular attention paid to the cloud tier. This proposed cloud tier, with a Data Management Platform (DMP) based on a three-layer Lambda architecture, achieves improved high throughput and low latency. This is done through the inclusion of two distributed ‘publish-subscribe’ Kafka-based modules which are designed for data processing, and for data subscribing and message storage, respectively. Initial trials have begun with two pilot platform-demonstration IoT systems, utilizing this EMULSION platform. These are shortly to be presented in separate research papers.