AWS Compute Blog

Processing geospatial IoT data with AWS IoT Core and the Amazon Location Service

This post is written by Swarna Kunnath (Cloud Application Architect), and Anand Komandooru (Sr. Cloud Application Architect).

This blog post shows how to republish messages that arrive from Internet of Things (IoT) devices across AWS accounts using a replatforming approach. A replatforming approach minimizes changes to the core application architecture, allowing an organization to reduce risk and meet business needs more quickly. In this post, you also learn how to track an IoT device’s location using the Amazon Location Service.

The example used in this post relates to an aviation company that has airplanes with line replacement unit devices or transponders. Transponders are IoT devices that send airplane geospatial data (location and altitude) to the AWS IoT Core service. The company’s airplane transponders send location data to the AWS IoT Core service provisioned in an existing AWS account (source account). The solution required manual intervention to track airplane location sent by the transponders.

They must rearchitect their application due to an internal reorganization event. As part of the rearchitecture approach, the business decides to enhance the application to process the transponder messages in another AWS account (destination account). In addition, the business needs full automation of the airplane’s location tracking process, to minimize the risk of the application changes, and to deliver the changes quickly.

Solution overview

The high-level solution republishes the IoT messages from the source account to the destination account using AWS IoT Core, Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, and integrates the application with Amazon Location Service. IoT messages are replicated to an IoT topic in the destination account for downstream processing, minimizing changes to the original application architecture. Integration with Amazon Location Service automates the process of device location tracking and alert generation.

The AWS IoT platform allows you to connect your internet-enabled devices to the AWS Cloud via MQTT, HTTP, or WebSocket protocol. Once connected, the devices send data to the MQTT topics. Data ingested on MQTT topics is routed into AWS services (Amazon S3, SQS, Amazon DynamoDB, and Lambda) by configuring rules in the AWS IoT Rules Engine. The AWS IoT Rules Engine offers ways to define queries to format and filter messages published by these devices, and supports integration with several other AWS services as targets.

The Amazon Location Service lets you add geospatial data including capabilities such as maps, points of interest, geocoding, routing, geofences, and tracking. The tracker with geofence tracks the location of the device based on the geospatial data in the published IoT messages. Amazon Location Service generates enter and exit events and integrates with Amazon EventBridge and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to generate alerts based on defined filters in EventBridge rules.

The solution in this post delivers high availability, scalability, and cost efficiency by using serverless and managed services. The serverless services used by this solution also provide automatic scaling and built-in high availability. Integrating Amazon Location Service with AWS IoT and EventBridge helps to automate the auditing and processing of geospatial messages.

Solution architecture

These steps describe an end-to-end sequence of events:

  1. An IoT device (a transponder in an airplane) publishes a message to the AWS IoT Core service in the source account.
  2. The message arrives at an AWS IoT Core topic in the source account.
  3. AWS IoT Rules Engine receives the message and processes it, using IoT rules attached to the corresponding topic in the source account.
  4. An AWS IoT rule replicates the message to an SQS queue in the destination account.
  5. A Lambda function in the destination account polls the SQS queue and publishes received messages in batches to the destination account IoT topic.
  6. The Location action configured to the IoT rule sends the messages to Amazon Location Service tracker from the IoT topic.
  7. An Amazon Location tracker sends events when an IoT device enters or exits a linked geofence.
  8. EventBridge receives these events and, via the configured event rule, sends out SNS notifications for the configured devices.

Pre-requisites

This example has the following prerequisites:

  1. Access to the AWS services mentioned in this blog post within two AWS Accounts.
  2. A local install of AWS SAM CLI to build and deploy the sample code.

Solution walkthrough

To deploy this solution, first deploy IoT components via the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM), in the source and destination accounts. After, configure Amazon Location Service resources in the destination account. To learn more, visit the AWS SAM deployment documentation.

Deploying the code

Deploy the following AWS SAM templates in order:

To build and deploy the code, run:

sam build --template <TemplateName>.yaml
sam deploy --guided

Configuring a tracker

Amazon Location Trackers send device location updates that provide data to retrieve current and historical locations for devices.

Using Amazon Location Trackers and Amazon Location Geofences together, you can automatically evaluate the location updates from your IoT devices against your geofences to generate the geofence events. Actions could be taken to generate the alerts based on the areas of interest.

  1. Follow the instructions in the documentation to create the tracker resource from the AWS Management Console. Use this information for the new tracker:
    • Name: Enter a unique name that has a maximum of 100 characters. For example, FlightTracker.
    • Description: Enter an optional description. For example, Tracker for storing device positions.
  2. Configure a Location action to the destination IoT rule that receives messages from the destination IoT topic and publishes them in batches to the configured Tracker device (for example, FlightTracker). The parameters in the JSON data that is returned to the Location action can also be configured via substitution templates.

Geofence collection

Geofences contain points and vertices that form a closed boundary, which defines an area of interest. For example, flight origin and destination details. You can use tools, such as GeoJSON.io, to draw geofences and save the output as a GeoJSON file. Follow the instructions in the documentation to create the GeoJSON file and link it to the geofence collection.

  1. Create the geofence collection with a GeoJSON file and link it to the tracker you just created.
  2. Link the tracker to the geofence by following these instructions and start tracking the device’s location updates. You can link them together so that you automatically evaluate location updates against all your geofences. You can evaluate device positions against geofences on demand as well.

When device positions are evaluated against geofences, they generate events. For example, when a plane enters or exits a location specified in the geofence.

You can configure EventBridge with rules to react to these events. You can set up SNS to notify your clients when a specific tracker device location changes. Follow the instructions in the documentation on how to set up EventBridge rules to integrate with Amazon Location Service events.

Testing the solution

You can test the first part of the solution by sending an IoT message with location details in the JSON format from the source account and verify that the message arrives at the destination account SQS queue. Detailed instructions to publish a test message from the source account that includes location information (latitude and longitude) can be found here.

Messages from the destination account SQS queue are published to the Amazon Location Service Tracker. When the location in the test message matches the criteria provided in the geofence, Amazon Location Service generates an event. EventBridge has a rule configured that gets matched when an Amazon Location tracker event arrives, and the rule target is an SNS topic that sends an email or text message to the client.

Cleaning up

To avoid incurring future charges, delete the CloudFormation stacks, location tracker, and geofence collection created as part of the solution walk-through. Replace the resource identifiers in the following commands with the ID/name of the resources.

  1. Delete the SAM application stack: 
    aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name <StackName>

    Refer to this documentation for further information.

  2. Delete the location tracker: 
    aws location delete-tracker --tracker-name <TrackerName>
  3. Delete the geofence collection: 
    aws location delete-geofence-collection --collection-name <GeoCollectionName>

Conclusion

This blog post shows how to create a serverless solution for cross account IoT message publishing and tracking device location updates using Amazon Location Service.

It describes the process of how to publish AWS IoT messages across multiple accounts. Integration with the Amazon Location Service shows how to track IoT device location updates and generate alerts, alleviating the need for manual device location tracking.

For more serverless learning resources, visit Serverless Land.