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AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Connected Airports Using Internet of Things on AWS

Overview

This Guidance demonstrates how you can enhance your airport’s operational efficiency and improve the passenger experience using the Internet of Things (IoT). Connect critical airport assets—like heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems; baggage handling, security, and access control systems; runways, taxiways, and passenger boarding bridges; and equipment and aircraft. Then, you can build an asset-monitoring system that provides insights and helps you streamline operations. You’ll be able to enact predictive maintenance, respond rapidly to downtime and disruptions, manage employee badges and tags, reduce passenger wait times, and make more-informed decisions.

How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.

Download the architecture diagram

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

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AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets you grant granular and least-privilege permissions so that users only have access to the specific resources they need. API Gateway enhances security for backend services and data by providing authentication and access control through API keys, helping you restrict access to your APIs and limit API rates using throttling. It also provides access logs and implementation logs to give you visibility into API usage and help you identify security issues.

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AWS IoT Core enables reliable bidirectional communication between IoT-connected airport assets and AWS services. It can handle a high volume of messages from many assets and reliably route those messages to AWS for downstream processing and connecting. It also helps you reliably collect and process telemetry IoT data from your airport assets. AWS IoT Core scales to support any number of devices without compromising on reliability, and the built-in retries facilitate reliable communication at scale. Additionally, AWS IoT Greengrass core devices can continue to operate locally if disconnected from the AWS Cloud.

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Amazon S3 provides cost-effective storage for any amount of data at scale. Its object life-cycle management and storage tiering reduce costs by automatically transitioning less frequently accessed data to more affordable tiers, such as Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) or Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes. This minimizes the overall storage expenses of your architecture at scale.

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AWS IoT Greengrass enables local compute, messaging, device shadow, and ML inference capabilities on edge devices. Performing compute and inference locally is more energy efficient than sending large amounts of data back and forth between local devices and the AWS Cloud. By reducing the need to transmit data to AWS for analysis, you can save network bandwidth and energy consumption and reduce the overall carbon footprint of your workloads.

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Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.