Andy Powell @andypowe11

@eduserv

Internet of Car Parks A discussion about IoT

• Practical IoT - What is it? Using the AWS IoT as an example

• IoT in action - a Bath Car Parks demo

• Discussion

• What is AWS IoT...?

• Message Broker - MQTT and HTTP topic-based pub/sub model

• Rules Engine - SQL-based language to select data from message payloads and push it into S3, DynamoDB and Lambda

• Thing Registry - Organises the resources associated with each thing, including certificates

• Thing Shadows service - Provides persistent representations of your things in the AWS cloud

• Thing Shadow - JSON document used to store and retrieve current state information for a thing (device, app, and so on)

• Device Gateway—Enables devices to securely and efficiently communicate with AWS IoT

• Bath Car Parks demo…

• Demo developed primarily to show capability of the IoT platform...

• ...but nothing here that couldn't also have been developed directly on the underlying data

• Don't get too excited - AWS IoT is designed to handle billions of devices - this demo deals with 8 car parks

• Single EC2 instance (virtual server) in AWS simulating 8 devices ('things')

• ...one for each car park in Bath

• Each 'device' pulls open data from the BathHacked data store every 5 minutes providing information about how full each car park is

• This data is then published to the AWS IoT platform using secure MQTT

• The Rules Engine parses each message and pushes a count of the number of available spaces into a DynamoDB table

• A central control process monitors the last 20 minutes of data from each car park in DynamoDB and assesses whether it is filling or emptying and how long until it is full

• A short message is then pushed back to the 'device' via the Message Broker using MQTT

• The same message is optionally published to Twitter (see @bathcarparks)

• Finally, a website shows historical data - http://www.bathcarparks.info

• Future work...

• Scope for added features

• Next nearest car park with spaces

• Typical spaces at given time/day

• Main enhancement would be to use AWS IoT as primary collection mechanism

• Which opens up a debate about why use IoT rather than existing methods?

• Conclusions...

• Well, the protocols work and integrate well with the rich service environment offered by AWS

• Coding devices is reasonably straight-forward

• Device SDK and language support somewhat limited but evolving

• Arduino and Rasberry Pi obvious candidate devices - various starter kits available

• Managing registry at scale will require automation

• Some URLs…

• http://aws.amazon.com/iot/

• http://aws.amazon.com/iot/sdk/

• http://aws.amazon.com/iot/getting-started/

• http://www.bathhacked.org/

• Discussion…

• Does IoT offer anything new?

• Is the cost/practicality of deployment at scale too high?

• What challenges are there around getting hold of IoT data sources?

• What are the issues around ownership and IPR?

• What are the benefits over current approaches?