An MQTT-based IoT Cloud Platform with Flow Design by Node-RED

Abstract

Nowadays, Internet of Things or IoT is gaining popularity. However, the process to set up the IoT platform is complex and time consuming for some IoT developers. Thus, this paper presents the design and development of an MQTT-based IoT cloud platform with flow design by Node-RED to help developers save time to set up the IoT platform by themselves. The user interface of this platform is in the form of a web application developed with the MERN stack. The platform provides three main services: (1) MQTT broker for data transmission (2) Node-RED for designing the flow of data processing and displaying data in graphical form via Dashboard and (3) InfluxDB and MongoDB databases for storing data. These services operate as containers running on the Docker. The web application connects to the Docker via Docker API using the Dockerode library to start, stop and get the status of the containers. Using the test by making an IoT system for monitoring and displaying temperature values, we found that our platform can support and help users in developing the IoT system very well. The developers who want to develop IoT systems do not need to set up an IoT platform by themselves.