IoT Manager: An open-source IoT framework for smart cities

Recent surveys concerning Internet of Things confirm that there are 20 billion connected devices and counting all around the world. As we assist to the convergence of the IoT and the cloud computing paradigms, sensor networks are being deployed everywhere and grow both in number and significance. One of the main concerns is thus to provide the community with versatile and resilient frameworks capable to store and rearrange data collected by these sensors. However, the world largest information technology companies tend to release products in a as a service fashion, avoiding to reveal the know-how concerning design and implementation details. As a consequence, a common trend for academic institutions is to use these mainstream IoT platforms as 'black boxes'. In this paper we discuss some of the most commonly adopted IoT platforms and we present IoT Manager, a general framework designed for sensor networks management which was entirely developed within the University of Bologna. Through this case study, we provide the scientific community with a detailed implementation strategy concerning our specific IoT solution. Our results are supported from a LGPL release of the IoT Manager client in order to serve as a test bed both for research and teaching purposes.