Vermillion: A High-Performance Scalable IoT Middleware for Smart Cities

TL;DR

Vermillion is a scalable, secure, open-source IoT middleware designed for smart cities, supporting horizontal scaling through hash-based federation to handle high loads efficiently.

Contribution

The paper introduces Vermillion, a middleware with built-in support for horizontal scaling, a formal data exchange process, and a hash-based federation approach for load management.

Findings

Successfully deployed in a city environment

Demonstrated high scalability and load distribution

Reduced synchronization overheads in message management

Abstract

With the massive increase in the number of IoT devices being deployed in smart cities, it becomes paramount for middlewares to be able to handle very high loads and support demanding use-cases. In order to do so, middlewares must scale horizontally while providing a commensurate increase in availability and throughput. Currently, most open-source IoT middlewares do not provide out-of-the-box support for scaling horizontally. In this paper, we present "Vermillion'', a scalable, secure and open-source IoT middleware for smart cities which provides in-built support for scaling-out. We make three contributions in this paper. Firstly, the middleware platform itself along with a formal process for data exchange between data producers and consumers. Secondly, we propose the use of hash-based federation to distribute and manage load across various message broker nodes while eliminating inter-node synchronisation overheads. Thirdly, we discuss a case study where Vermillion was deployed in a city and briefly discuss about deployment considerations using the obtained results.