CENT’s IoT testbed setup started in the Fall/2017 semester and continues to evolve. The complete testbed will have a structure as depicted in Figure 1.

The testbed provides infrastructure for experiential learning and research for IoT. Among its principal components, we have: i) Several connectivity options for sensor and systems ( wired Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and LoRaWAN), ii) machine to machine communication with a focus on MQTT, and iii) a storage and processing cluster leveraging ThingsBoard, an ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), and Kafka.

Our connectivity infrastructure includes a dedicated IoT SSID available in Hinds Hall, two LoRaWAN gateways, one located in Hinds Hall and the other on top of a 20 story building in downtown Syracuse, and a core network in the CENT lab on the second floor of Hinds Hall.

Several Raspberry Pi 3 nodes with a customized sensor board will be deployed in the building of the School of Information Studies (Hinds Hall) enabling the building to act as a “living lab” for IoT projects. The data captured by these nodes will be sent to our data processing cluster.  Beyond its use in IoT experiments, we anticipate using the data in several courses at the iSchool related to data analytics and visualization.