Internet-of-things infrastructure as a platform for distributed measurement applications

The keystone of many applications associated to the vision of the Internet of Things is a distributed measurement and data acquisition system. Its design represents a major challenge, because it must enable concurrent measurement of different signals, with heterogeneous sensors and communication protocols. It must also be secure and scalable (in the sense of low marginal cost of adding new features and sensors). We propose the architecture of such a system and demonstrate two different use cases: a distributed system for electric power metering, and a wearable ECG monitoring system for multiple patients. We show that our proposed solution is flexible in terms of measured quantities, and can easily adapt to different data rates. In addition, it allows us to reach record performance in terms of energy consumption per effective number of quantization levels, as we demonstrate in the case of ECG sensors.