AWS IoT Platform

There are multiple IoT platforms, each work in different ways. We will be using the AWS IoT platform as the MQTT broker and receive data from the microcontroller and to make it available to a Lambda function to process to save it to the database and Smart Contract. AWS provides a seamless integration between its MQTT Broker and Microservices, without requiring an API.

Things, IoT Rules, and Topics

Microcontrollers will publish data to the IoT platform using the MQTT protocol. To use AWS IoT Core, each microcontroller must be registered as a Thing.

The following three Things must be registered:

i. The Loading microcontroller.
ii. The On Vehicle microcontroller.
iii. The Unloading microcontroller.

AWS IoT Core works with the approach of rules that are used as triggers to execute a function when data is published from a microcontroller to a Topic. With this approach, there is no process that “subscribes” to the topic as in a traditional MQTT architecture.

In this implementation, we will be using AWS Lambda functions to process the data. There will be a single topic and a single rule configured to invoke a Lambda function which will read the published data and pre-process the data before storing it in the database and sending it to the smart contract.

The diagram below illustrates how MQTT and Lambda functions work together: