Internet of Things : Quantitative Evaluation on Microsoft Azure IoT Suite

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly gaining ground in our daily life. There is a trend that the number of devices and data increases rapidly in the future. Meanwhile, IoT platforms are emerging to enable people conveniently deal with the IoT and these huge amount of data and devices. Therefore, the goal in this paper is to perform a quantitative evaluation on Microsoft Azure, one of the IoT platform, about its advantages and disadvantages under press to determine if Azure IoT is fit for future IoT. In order to reach this goal, Azure IoT Hub is used as a bridge to connect and manage lots of IoT devices which send and receive huge amount of data. .NET is used to simulate devices and connect them to the IoT Hub. The two-way communication from sensor to cloud and from cloud to actuator is implemented through MQTT protocol. This paper makes measurements on three metrics including response time from sensor sending messages to actuator receiving messages, scalability and cost and analyzes them in detail. Besides, the analysis is also made in a specific scenario which has high demand on sensor update to see how Azure IoT performs. Finally, conclusion is made on Microsoft Azure IoT's advantages and disadvantages under stress