The Leverege Platform

Technical White Paper

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next evolution of the Internet; providing the opportunity
to collect and analyze massive amounts of new information. However, simply having
access to more information is not sufficient - businesses need to turn this tidal wave of
data into actionable insights that can be used to improve products and increase
operational efficiency. The Leverege platform is a comprehensive IoT solution that helps
cut through the noise and enables businesses to run smarter and leaner.
This Leverege Platform white paper provides insight into how Leverege
Reason
,
Leverege Vision
, and Leverege Curator
work synergistically to solve large-scale
customer data problems for IoT applications.

About Leverege

Leverege develops software products that enable customers to intelligently manage and
visualize large networks of diverse sensors; providing actionable insights and spotting
trends that lead to better decision making.
Leverege is headquartered in Germantown Maryland, just outside of Washington DC, and
was founded in 2014 by successful technology entrepreneurs with deep experience in
sensor networking and big data system architectures. The mission-critical products built
by the Leverege team are used daily by Fortune 500 companies and Governments
around the world and span many industries including defense and aerospace, advertising,
and sports and entertainment.

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Leverege Architecture Overview

The Leverege Platform is a distributed, scalable system designed to collect and analyze
data streams, enabling customers to manage and visualize large networks of sensors.
Several overarching objectives in the design of platform are:
Deliver a complete platform that also includes APIs as well as integrated tools for
management, monitoring, and deployment.
Create a platform that easily scales and adapts to customer needs.
Build support for a diverse data collection environments that may be custom or
include M2M and internet messaging standards such as MQTT, CoAP, DDS,
HTTP/2 and others.
Provide a robust system capable of running across a wide range of deployment
environments that include on-premise, in a co-location facility, or via a cloud
provider.
Provide an open architecture that allows customers and partners easy access to
the data as well as the ability to extend the platform.

This architecture allows the platform to support a wide variety of sensor and data
collection use cases, such as:

Defense and aerospace

Industrial control
Asset tracking and inventory management
Smart city initiatives such as smart parking and resource metering
Vehicle tracking and fleet applications
Logistics and remote monitoring
Infrastructure protection and perimeter security
Smart lighting and energy management

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System Architecture

The Leverege Platform is a comprehensive visualization and decision support platform for
the Internet of Things (IoT) that is composed of three major component areas:
Reason
,
Vision
, and
Curator
. The following sections introduce the major component areas and
provide additional details about each set of components.

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Leverege
Reason

Leverege
Reason is a big data message processing system that supports complex
event processing (CEP), providing the ability to combine data from multiple sources to
detect patterns and quickly identify trends, threats, or important data elements. Reason
supports processing data in real time, allowing a user to take immediate action, and
batch processing for jobs that evaluate data collected in the past. Reason also enables
users to create ad-hoc jobs for answering one-time or infrequent questions. All analysis
results are then available for visualization and interaction in
Vision and are also
accumulated in long term storage. Data streams can also pass directly to Vision without
any intermediary processing.

Levereges open architecture allows for any information flowing through Reason to be
available in near real time for Vision, utilized for real time batch processing jobs, or simply
available for reporting. It also enables customers to build their own reporting or
visualization tools on top of Reason. Each component in the system is scalable and

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distributable, allowing for horizontal scaling as needed. Leverege makes it easy to

increase or decrease the number of running components in any subsystem to respond to
changes in the data volume or processing requirements. This is important as it alleviates
issues around resource bottlenecks caused by overutilization and eliminates resource
waste due to underutilization.

Ingestion and Comprehension

The ingestion and comprehension subsystems are the entry point for all data into the
system. Each data source is collected through data ingestors, which can be scaled to
consume very small or very large data sets. Ingestion and comprehension are split into
separate components to facilitate rapid data ingestion. This architecture ensures that
there is very little delay in capturing the raw data from the source into the Leverege
Platform for processing and interaction.
As mentioned previously, the number of
ingestors can be quickly increased or decreased to respond appropriately to changes in
source data volume.
Once the data is consumed by the ingestors, it moves through the pipeline to the
comprehension components. Each of these components is designed to understand the
ingested data such that it can route the data appropriately and place it onto the proper
data queue for downstream processing. Once data is in a data queue, it can be
consumed by any number of downstream processes, including real time processing
pipelines, batch processing, or directly by Vision without any additional data processing.
Data is not limited to a single data queue or a single processing path - the comprehension
components place data into single or multiple queues depending on the governing
business logic and that data can be consumed by both the real time processing and
batch processing subsystems as well as by Vision directly. Data queues by default are
designed to retain the data for a configurable time period, but they also support the ability
to purge the data once it has been read from the queue. All of the data can also be
stored in long term storage from any location in the data pipeline.

Real Time Processing

The real time processing components enable operational intelligence (OI), allowing
customers to take immediate action against live data feeds. Real time data processing
involves continuous evaluation of data streams, the results of which may be utilized in
real time operational dashboards or tactical displays. The Reason real time processing
subsystem consumes data from data queues and evaluates the data stream in a
processing pipeline. A processing pipeline involves one or more steps, each of which
evaluate the data and generate output or transform the data. This includes performing
various activities such as:

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Correlating events or data collected from multiple devices

Applying statistical noise reduction filters
Discerning patterns in the data flow
Triggering notifications for geo-fencing, activity monitoring, environmental
monitoring, or other event analysis

Reason is also able to utilize historical data in combination with the real time data streams
to detect patterns in the data on the fly. Each relevant data point in the processing flow
may be stored or made directly available to other components in the Leverege
ecosystem.

Batch Processing
Batch processing provides a facility for evaluating very large data sets over an extended
period of time in an automated fashion. This type of processing is typically thought of as
more related to traditional business intelligence (BI) mechanisms. Each of these
processes is broken into jobs that are scheduled to run across a scalable cluster. Every
job or job grouping is assigned a schedule and relative priority, which determine when the
job runs and how many, or what percentage, of resources are allocated to completing the
job. Job priority can be altered on the fly if required to meet a deadline or to free up more
resources for other jobs. All jobs can also be cancelled or paused, if needed.
The batch processing engine also supports the creation of ad-hoc jobs for those times
when a customer has a new question to answer but doesnt require a scheduled job.
Each of these ad-hoc jobs can easily be turned into a scheduled job as well.

Data Storage
The data storage layer is a multi-model datastore used to securely house all forms of
customer data together into a single storage system that is both horizontally and
vertically scalable. It is the heart of the overall Leverege platform as this layer is used as a
repository for all raw and processed data in the system. This architecture allows
Leverege to store petabyte sized data sets composed of many different types of data and
make those datum available for quick retrieval, while replicating the data across a storage
cluster to ensure data availability. Each data type is stored in the most appropriate form
as determined by the type, use, and format of the data.
Some examples of data that can be stored in the data storage layer include:

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Geospatial data that could be used for geo-visualization, geo-fencing, or

geo-routing
Time series data that indicates energy use or temperature change over time
Geospatial and relationship / graph data that may be used for network analysis
Sensor messages that can be used to visualize trends or detect threats
Video and images files that can be tagged, correlated, and evaluated via object
detection algorithms

While the list above indicates some of the data storage types and examples of data the
storage layer supports, the real power is that these different datasets and technologies
can be used together to build comprehensive solutions to complex analysis and
visualization problems in an environment that ensures fault tolerance and blazing fast
data retrieval.

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Leverege
Vision

Leverege
Vision is a portion of the Leverege platform which customers utilize to gain
insight into their sensor networks. Vision provides Command and Control (C2) dashboard
functionality giving customers not only a tactical view into the current state of their
network, but also an interface to manage and operate the entire system. Additionally,
Vision includes a robust API layer that powers the presentation layer and can be used to
more deeply integrate with the Leverege platform.

Presentation Logic
A user interface should not be simply utilitarian - it should be human-centric, intuitive, and
easy to use. The Vision UI is an extensible web-based framework that allows customers
to quickly understand and make decisions on all of the data that is available. It is designed
to run 24x7 and can support both passive and active operational modes.
Vision allows a customer to visualize their data in a number of ways that include
everything from simple tables and detail boxes, to much more complex geospatial and
time series views, as well as visualization drill downs. The logic used in data presentation
is separate from the data itself, allowing the UI to remain responsive, lightweight, and to
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easily adapt to changes in the data. This also allows Vision to support a wide variety of
device form factors, from very large, room-size tactical command centers to individual
desktop displays and all the way down to tablets and smartphones.
Each of the screens are built using a configuration driven approach. Vision utilizes display
and layout factories such that each object can be defined and then tied together into a
complex interface. Display objects can be easily reused from screen to screen and a
model-view-controller approach naturally supports the linking of events and objects
among display elements. This feature enables users to quickly navigate to the information
that they need to find or search for objects of interest across the entire interface without
losing situational awareness.

Service Layer
The Vision service layer serves as the middleware between Vision and Reason. Everything
that appears in the Vision UI passes through this layer, which facilitates the strong
separation of concerns that allows the UI to remain lightweight and unencumbered with
business logic related to serving data.

This layer enables data retrieval and collaboration technologies, as well as sending
commands back upstream to the devices. Every action taken in the UI is governed by a Role

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Based Access Control (RBAC) security service, providing the granular controls customers
need to ensure that each user has the ability to perform their job while protecting the data
from untrained or unauthorized individuals.
The Vision service layer also serves as a web-based API into the Leverege Platform. Every
datapoint or service available to the Vision UI is also available through the Services API.
Most of this functionality is provided through REST services, although endpoints that provide
streaming data feeds leverage technologies such as websockets or server sent events (SSE).

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Leverege
Curator

Every good system requires a powerful management layer and the Leverege Platform is no
exception.
Curator is our platform management solution. Just as Reason and Vision are
the C2 platform for IoT, Curator is the control platform for all of the Reason and Vision
components and infrastructure.

Curator allows customers to view the Leverege system logs and inspect the overall system
health in one place. However, it goes several steps beyond simple monitoring and
inspection. Curator allows an administrator to provision new resources, define data
governance rules, change batch job schedules, and plays a central role in registering new
components. It serves as a virtual operating system, resource manager, configuration
manager, and monitoring solution all rolled up into one cohesive set of management tools
with an intuitive UI that places all of that power at an administrators fingertips.

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