Bolt: Data Management for Connected Homes

We present Bolt, a data management system for an emerging class of applications—those that manipulate data from connected devices in the home. It abstracts this data as a stream of time-tag-value records, with arbitrary, application-defined tags. For reliable sharing among applications, some of which may be running outside the home, Bolt uses untrusted cloud storage as seamless extension of local storage. It organizes data into chunks that contains multiple records and are individually compressed and encrypted. While chunking enables efficient transfer and storage, it also implies that data is retrieved at the granularity of chunks, instead of records. We show that the resulting overhead, however, is small because applications in this domain frequently query for multiple proximate records. We develop three diverse applications on top of Bolt and find that the performance needs of each are easily met. We also find that compared to OpenTSDB, a popular time-series database system, Bolt is up to 40 times faster than OpenTSDB while requiring 3–5 times less storage space.