Engineering an IoT-Edge-Cloud Computing System Architecture: Lessons Learnt from An Undergraduate Lab Course

TL;DR

This paper describes the design of an undergraduate lab course that teaches students to build and evaluate IoT-edge-cloud systems using open source tools and various communication protocols.

Contribution

It presents a modular, open-source lab setup for teaching IoT-edge-cloud system integration and performance evaluation, which is novel in educational approaches.

Findings

Students can implement multiple communication protocols.

The system allows performance benchmarking.

Open source tools facilitate practical learning.

Abstract

With the rapid advances in IoT, edge and cloud computing solutions, it is critical to educate and train students in computer science and engineering in various aspects of IoT-edge-cloud (IoT-E-C) system architecture implementations. We outline the design and development of an undergraduate laboratory course that sets the goal of implementing various interfaces and communication protocols to connect IoT, edge and cloud computing systems and evaluating their performance. The lab setup is modular and based on open source tools. In the IoT context, it consists of low-cost processing platforms with various sensors and actuators. In the edge and cloud computing context, we implement and deploy single board computers and Firebase cloud solutions, respectively. The modular lab setup allows students to engineer and integrate various communication protocol solutions, including MQTT, COAP and HTTP. In addition to the system implementation, students can evaluate and benchmark the performance of the entire system.