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An empirical characterization of IFTTT: ecosystem, usage, and performance

Published: 01 November 2017 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    IFTTT is a popular trigger-action programming platform whose applets can automate more than 400 services of IoT devices and web applications. We conduct an empirical study of IFTTT using a combined approach of analyzing data collected for 6 months and performing controlled experiments using a custom testbed. We profile the interactions among different entities, measure how applets are used by end users, and test the performance of applet execution. Overall we observe the fast growth of the IFTTT ecosystem and its increasing usage for automating IoT-related tasks, which correspond to 52% of all services and 16% of the applet usage. We also observe several performance inefficiencies and identify their causes.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IMC '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference
    November 2017
    509 pages
    ISBN:9781450351188
    DOI:10.1145/3131365
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 01 November 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. IFTTT
    2. IoT
    3. measurement

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    IMC '17
    IMC '17: Internet Measurement Conference
    November 1 - 3, 2017
    London, United Kingdom

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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    ACM Internet Measurement Conference
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    • (2024)Clustering on heterogeneous IoT information network based on meta pathScience Progress10.1177/00368504241257389107:2Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
    • (2024)laTAPE: Location-Aware Programming and Executing Trigger-Action RulesProceedings of the 15th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware10.1145/3671016.3672579(503-506)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
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