Experiences Creating a Framework for Smart Traffic Control using AWS IOT

Public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's Azure provide excellent capabilities for scalable Web applications and Hadoop-based processing. Recent additions to public clouds to support connected devices and IoT have the potential to similarly disrupt emerging homegrown and/or proprietary approaches. While early public cloud IoT success stories have focused on smaller-scale scenarios such as connected houses, it is unclear to what extent these new public cloud mechanisms and abstractions are suitable and effective for larger-scale and/or scientific scenarios, which often have a different set of constraints or requirements. In this paper, the design and implementation of a representative cloud-based IoT infrastructure in a specific public cloud - AWS - is presented. The system created is for dynamic vehicle traffic control based on vehicle volumes/patterns and public transport punctuality. We find that constructing server-less, stateful, and data driven IoT applications in AWS that can operate in real-time is non-trivial. The primary challenges span application manageability and design, latency performance, asynchronicity, and scalability.