  The Internet of Things (IoT), which enables common objects to be intelligent
and interactive, is considered the next evolution of the Internet. Its
pervasiveness and abilities to collect and analyze data which can be converted
into information have motivated a plethora of IoT applications. For the
successful deployment and management of these applications, cloud computing
techniques are indispensable since they provide high computational capabilities
as well as large storage capacity. This paper aims at providing insights about
the architecture, implementation and performance of the IoT cloud. Several
potential application scenarios of IoT cloud are studied, and an architecture
is discussed regarding the functionality of each component. Moreover, the
implementation details of the IoT cloud are presented along with the services
that it offers. The main contributions of this paper lie in the combination of
the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport
(MQTT) servers to offer IoT services in the architecture of the IoT cloud with
various techniques to guarantee high performance. Finally, experimental results
are given in order to demonstrate the service capabilities of the IoT cloud
under certain conditions.
