Q-IoT: A Distributed Platform for Schemaless Integration of Heterogeneous BLE Sensors

One of the most pressing challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) landscape is the lack of a unified standard protocol for sensor integration and data acquisition in Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. While various solutions have been proposed in the literature to support dynamic device integration, the fluid, simultaneous integration of heterogeneous Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) sensors is not well supported. Specifically, existing solutions struggle to support coexistence between devices based on standard Generic ATTribute Profile (GATT) profiles and those that employ complex, proprietary protocols (such as REST-like paradigms over BLE for high-frequency streams). To address this gap, this paper presents Q-IoT, a distributed software platform designed to support developers and researchers. The system simplifies the integration of diverse BLE sensors and enables the acquisition, normalization, and transmission of data in a standard JSON format. It shifts the binary payload decoding logic directly to the Mobile Edge Gateway, enabling the integration of new physical devices by simply modifying a remote configuration file (YAML), thereby eliminating the need for source code recompilation or integration of sensor-specific Software Development Kits (SDKs). The developed solution exposes the data collected from the connected sensors through two interfaces: an MQTT broker provides real-time data. At the same time, RESTful APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow the consultation of historical data stored in a Time-Series database. The paper provides a flexible, agnostic, and ready-touse tool that the research community can easily exploit as a basis for future works, for instance, in complex e-Health or industrial telemetry experiments.