Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, when adequately integrated, cater for logistics optimisation and operations' environmental impact monitoring, both key aspects for today's EU ports management. This article presents Obelisk, a scalable and multi-tenant cloud-based IoT integration platform used in the EU H2020 PortForward project. The landscape of IoT protocols being particularly fragmented, the first role of Obelisk is to provide uniform access to data originating from a myriad of devices and protocols. Interoperability is achieved through adapters that provide flexibility and evolvability in protocol and format mapping. Additionally, due to ports operating in a hub model with various interacting actors, a second role of Obelisk is to secure access to data. This is achieved through encryption and isolation for data transport and processing, respectively, while user access control is ensured through authentication and authorisation standards. Finally, as ports IoTisation will further evolve, a third need for Obelisk is to scale with the data volumes it must ingest and process. Platform scalability is achieved by means of a reactive micro-services based design. Those three essential characteristics are detailed in this article with a specific focus on how to achieve IoT data platform scalability. By means of an air quality monitoring use-case deployed in the city of Antwerp, the scalability of the platform is evaluated. The evaluation shows that the proposed reactive micro-service based design allows for horizontal scaling of the platform as well as for logarithmic time complexity of its service time.

中文翻译：

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智能港口可扩展物联网后端的设计与评估

物联网 (IoT) 技术在充分集成后可满足物流优化和运营环境影响监测的需求，这两个方面都是当今欧盟港口管理的关键方面。本文介绍了 Obelisk，这是 EU H2020 PortForward 项目中使用的基于云的可扩展和多租户物联网集成平台。物联网协议的格局特别分散，Obelisk 的第一个作用是提供对源自无数设备和协议的数据的统一访问。互操作性是通过在协议和格式映射方面提供灵活性和可演化性的适配器实现的。此外，由于端口在具有各种交互参与者的集线器模型中运行，Obelisk 的第二个作用是保护对数据的访问。这是通过分别对数据传输和处理进行加密和隔离来实现的，同时通过身份验证和授权标准确保用户访问控制。最后，作为端口物联网化将进一步发展，Obelisk 的第三个需求是随着它必须摄取和处理的数据量而扩展。平台可扩展性是通过基于反应式微服务的设计实现的。本文详细介绍了这三个基本特征，特别关注如何实现物联网数据平台的可扩展性。通过部署在安特卫普市的空气质量监测用例，评估了该平台的可扩展性。评估表明，所提出的基于反应式微服务的设计允许平台的水平扩展以及其服务时间的对数时间复杂度。