Performance Evaluation of Information Gathering from Edge Devices in a Complex of Smart Buildings.

Florin Lăcătușu,Adriana Olteanu,Marian Lăcătușu,Anca Daniela Ionita

doi:10.3390/s22031002

Florin Lăcătușu, Adriana Olteanu + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s22031002

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Abstract

The use of monitoring systems based on cloud computing has become common for smart buildings. However, the dilemma of centralization versus decentralization, in terms of gathering information and making the right decisions based on it, remains. Performance, dependent on the system design, does matter for emergency detection, where response time and loading behavior become very important. We studied several design options based on edge computing and containers for a smart building monitoring system that sends alerts to the responsible personnel when necessary. The study evaluated performance, including a qualitative analysis and load testing, for our experimental settings. From 700+ edge nodes, we obtained response times that were 30% lower for the public cloud versus the local solution. For up to 100 edge nodes, the values were better for the latter, and in between, they were rather similar. Based on an interpretation of the results, we developed recommendations for five real-world configurations, and we present the design choices adopted in our development for a complex of smart buildings.

Highlights

The transformation of people’s lives through the use of smart buildings has become a trend for residential purposes, university and corporate campuses, and commercial complexes, where it is important to focus on both socioeconomic and environmental factors that can be facilitated by smart technologies [1], including the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing [2,3]
Given the existing design alternatives, our research focused on testing the performance of the Edge Watcher System (EWS) smart building monitoring system
To test the containerized architecture options for the EWS, we implemented two configurations, corresponding to the analysis presented in Section 3.1: (A) The IBM Cloud Kubernetes cluster was implemented for the public cloud Kubernetes cluster design option with the following technical details:

Summary

Introduction

The transformation of people’s lives through the use of smart buildings has become a trend for residential purposes, university and corporate campuses, and commercial complexes, where it is important to focus on both socioeconomic and environmental factors that can be facilitated by smart technologies [1], including the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing [2,3]. Edge computing is similar to cloud computing in some respects, it differs when the location of the resources is taken into account; the computing resources are situated in a local network, called the edge network, where services are provided correspondingly, as in the case of cloud implementation In such an architecture, data that are processed on multiple different devices at the edge of the network are sent to the Cloud to be further analyzed and used by other applications. Data that are processed on multiple different devices at the edge of the network are sent to the Cloud to be further analyzed and used by other applications Another term that is used in conjunction with edge devices is fog computing. The term “fog computing” has been primarily used by Cisco to define devices that can process data in the field

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