Data Processing and Collection in Distributed Systems

Abstract: Distributed systems can be seen in a variety of applications that is in use today. Tritech provides several systems that to some extent consist of distributed systems of nodes. These nodes collect data and the data have to be processed. A problem that often appears when designing these systems, is deciding where the data should be processed, i.e., which architecture is the most suitable one for the system. Decide the architecture for these systems are not simple, especially since it changes rather quickly due to the development in these areas. The thesis aims to perform a study regarding which factors affect the choice of architecture in a distributed system and how these factors relate to each other. To be able to analyze which factors do affect the choice of architecture and to what extent, a simulator was implemented. The simulator received information about the factors as input, and return one or several architecture configurations as output. By performing qualitative interviews, the input factors to the simulator were chosen. The factors that were analyzed in the thesis was: security, storage, working memory, size of data, number of nodes, data processing per data set, robust communication, battery consumption, and cost. From the qualitative interviews as well as from the prestudy five architecture configuration was chosen. The chosen architectures were: thin-client server, thick-client server, three-tier client-server, peer-to-peer, and cloud computing. The simulator was validated regarding the three given use cases: agriculture, the train industry, and industrial Internet of Things. The validation consisted of five existing projects from Tritech. From the results of the validation, the simulator produced correct results for three of the five projects. By using the simulator results, it could be seen which factors affect the choice of architecture more than others and are hard to provide in the same architecture since they are conflicting factors. The conflicting factors were security together with working memory and robust communication. The factor working memory together with battery consumption also showed to be conflicting factors and is hard to provide within the same architecture. Therefore, according to the simulator, it can be seen that the factors that affect the choice of architecture were working memory, battery consumption, security, and robust communication. By using the results of the simulator, a decision matrix was designed whose purpose was to facilitate the choice of architecture. The evaluation of the decision matrix consisted of four projects from Tritech including the three given use cases: agriculture, the train industry, and industrial Internet of Things. The evaluation of the decision matrix showed that the two architectures that received the most points, one of the architectures were used in the validated project.