Benchmarking Distributed Stream Processing Platforms for IoT Applications

Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology paradigm where millions of sensors monitor, and help inform or manage, physical, environmental and human systems in real-time. The inherent closed-loop responsiveness and decision making of IoT applications makes them ideal candidates for using low latency and scalable stream processing platforms. Distributed Stream Processing Systems (DSPS) are becoming essential components of any IoT stack, but the efficacy and performance of contemporary DSPS have not been rigorously studied for IoT data streams and applications. Here, we develop a benchmark suite and performance metrics to evaluate DSPS for streaming IoT applications. The benchmark includes 13 common IoT tasks classified across various functional categories and forming micro-benchmarks, and two IoT applications for statistical summarization and predictive analytics that leverage various dataflow compositional features of DSPS. These are coupled with stream workloads sourced from real IoT observations from smart cities. We validate the IoT benchmark for the popular Apache Storm DSPS, and present empirical results.