A Scalable Big Stream Cloud Architecture for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) will consist of billions (50 billions by 2020) of interconnected heterogeneous devices denoted as "Smart Objects:" tiny, constrained devices which are going to be pervasively deployed in several contexts. To meet low-latency requirements, IoT applications must rely on specific architectures designed to handle the gigantic stream of data coming from Smart Objects. This paper propose a novel Cloud architecture for Big Stream applications that can efficiently handle data coming from Smart Objects through a Graph-based processing platform and deliver processed data to consumer applications with low latency. The authors reverse the traditional "Big Data" paradigm, where real-time constraints are not considered, and introduce the new "Big Stream" paradigm, which better fits IoT scenarios. The paper provides a performance evaluation of a practical open-source implementation of the proposed architecture. Other practical aspects, such as security considerations, and possible business oriented exploitation plans are presented.