A Storage Infrastructure for Heterogeneous and Multimedia Data in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of networked objects deployed worldwide and connected over the Internet. As a consequence, the major aspects of the IoT are represented by the heterogeneity and the huge number of the participating devices. These aspects also constitute the major challenges in the definition of a storage infrastructure suitable for IoT applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel data model and storage infrastructure for the IoT to address these challenges. Different from other works in the literature, we exploit a document-oriented approach and show how it is suitable to support both heterogeneous and multimedia data. Our solution is built on top of the CouchDB database server, offers a Restful API, and provides a rich set of features targeted to IoT applications. Moreover, we devise optimized schemes for uploading documents which are specifically tailored to resource-constrained IoT devices. We evaluate our proposed schemes both analytically and with experiments in a real system.