Novel IoT Development Kit for Personalized Smart Ecosystems: Aliot

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing field in computer science that needs more experts than ever before. In fact, there are currently 12.2 billion active connections of things, and it is predicted that this number will go up to 27 billion by 2025 [1]. Creating a complete IoT ecosystem is a time-consuming task and most of the time represents unnecessary trouble for a newcomer in this field. In this context, this paper proposes Aliot, an advanced development kit designed to help researchers and learners in their IoT projects. Aliot offers flexible tools available in two of the most popular programming languages in IoT, Python, and C++. It handles most of the required layers in a connected ecosystem while offering a lot of freedom to the end-user. It provides a reliable and secure connection for multiple connected devices with many unique features such as real-time monitoring and data management. Aliot was tested and used in many research projects, such as a smart city and a connected greenhouse. Preliminary results show that Aliot outperforms the traditional approach of developing an IoT ecosystem by reducing the amount of code written by more than 80% and 10 times faster to develop.