Spatial Data Management in IoT Systems: Solutions and Evaluation

As the Internet of Things (IoT) systems gain in popularity, an increasing number of Big Data sources are available. Ranging from small sensor networks designed for household use to large fully automated industrial environments, the IoT systems create billions of measurements each second making traditional storage and indexing solutions obsolete. While research around Big Data has focused on scalable solutions that can support the datasets produced by these systems, the focus has been mainly on managing the volume and velocity of these data, rather than providing efficient solutions for their retrieval and analysis. A key characteristic of these data, which is, more often than not, overlooked, is the spatial information that can be used to integrate data from multiple sources and conduct multi-dimensional analysis of the collected information. We present here the solutions currently available for the storage and indexing of spatial datasets produced by the IoT systems and we discuss their applicability in real-world scenarios.