Amazon Smartsales Ticketing System

This work is integrated in the SmartCITIES Cloud Ticketing project from Link Consulting SA, aiming at proposing a multi-tenancy implementation of a ticketing system on the Amazon cloud platform. The SmartCITIES project introduced the “thin device” concept, which allows transferring the traditional ticketing operations to a cloud platform, increasing elasticity and providing interoperability. This approach raises several concerns, namely security issues and latency in communications. A gate in a public transportation device has to check ticket validity in less than 300ms. With this in mind, we propose a Cloud Ticketing Communication Testing Platform (SmartSales), developed to benchmark the normal ticketing operations (e.g., sale, recharge and validation), while providing insights on the latency, according to several levels of security, available network and Cloud topology. Several metrics associated with the round-trip time (RTT) of communications made by the prototype were collected to explore possible situations where the “thin device” concept can be used. The acquired results point towards the possible migration of most e-ticketing systems with the SmartCITIES Cloud Ticketing project architecture to the Cloud.