With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), IoT gateways will become an important link connecting the perception layer network and the communication layer network. As a gateway device, the IoT gateway must not only bear the responsibility of protocol conversion between different types of perception networks, but also become increasingly intelligent, possessing certain management functions for the underlying node devices.
With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), IoT gateways will become an important link connecting the perception layer network and the communication layer network. As a gateway device, the IoT gateway must not only bear the responsibility of protocol conversion between different types of perception networks, but also become increasingly intelligent, possessing certain management functions for the underlying node devices.
Suppose your name is Little Dot, and you live in a large yard with many little friends as neighbors, and your parents are your gateways. When you want to play with a certain friend in the yard, you just have to shout their name, and if they hear you, they will come out to play with you.
However, your parents do not allow you to leave the gate, so any contact you want to have with the outside world must be facilitated by your parents (the gateway) through a phone call. If you want to chat with your classmate Xiaoming, who lives far away in another yard, his parents (Xiaoming’s gateway) also exist. But you don’t know Xiaoming’s phone number, but your teacher has a list of all your classmates’ names and phone numbers; your teacher is your DNS server. So you have the following conversation with your parents at home:
Little Dot: Mom (or Dad), can I ask the teacher for Xiaoming’s phone number? Parents: Okay, wait a moment. (Then your parents call your teacher to find out Xiaoming’s phone number) They find out that his number is 211.99.99.99.
Little Dot: Great! Mom (or Dad), can you help me contact Xiaoming?
Parents: No problem. (Then the parents make a request to the telephone exchange to connect to Xiaoming’s house, and of course, it eventually gets transferred to Xiaoming’s parents, who then connect the call to Xiaoming).
That’s how you got in touch with Xiaoming.
To put it simply, when you want to move from one room to another, you must pass through a door. Similarly, when sending information from one network to another, it must pass through a “gateway”.
From the story, we can understand that: the gateway is a computer system or device that acts as a translator between systems using different communication protocols, data formats, or even completely different architectures. The gateway acts as a translator, repackaging the received information to meet the needs of the destination system. At the same time, the gateway can also provide filtering and security functions.
Let’s first look at the complex requirements: smart homes, connected cars, smart factories, smart healthcare… In various IoT application fields, can you understand all the devices? Compared to the internet, future IoT communication protocols will be more numerous, and fragmentation will be more severe. As a result, IoT gateways need to be able to process and integrate the information collected from the front end and deliver it to the remote end.
Take home appliances as an example: air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, water heaters, microwave ovens, rice cookers, etc., will all have communication capabilities in the future. When they need to communicate with the outside world for remote control, the home IoT gateway will play an important role; however, achieving dialogue between devices with different communication protocols is also a challenge.
According to relevant research data, by 2020, more than 200 billion devices will need to connect to the internet, creating a massive IoT that could be considered true connectivity.
Currently, you may have heard of many technical standards for short-range communication, including ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, RS485, CAN, WLAN, GPRS, 3G, etc. These include protocols, interfaces, buses, communication methods, etc. IoT gateways are designed to work with middleware and upper-layer applications to allow or block upstream and downstream data. Therefore, future IoT gateways will integrate various functional modules such as firewalls, VPNs, DoS, traffic management, IPS, IDS, internet behavior management, content filtering, web security, antivirus, and anti-spam, to meet various protection needs, thus truly achieving comprehensive business security.
First, it must have widespread access capabilities. Currently, there are many technical standards for short-range communication, and common WSNs technologies include Lonworks, ZigBee, 6LowPAN, RUBEE, etc. Various technologies mainly focus on specific applications and lack compatibility and systematic planning. Standardization work for IoT gateways is already underway domestically and internationally, such as 3GPP and sensor working groups, to achieve interconnectivity among various communication technology standards.
Secondly, it must have management capabilities. Strong management capabilities are essential for any large network. First, the gateway must be managed, such as registration management, permission management, and status monitoring. The gateway should manage nodes within the subnet, such as obtaining node identifiers, statuses, attributes, energy levels, etc., and remotely wake up, control, diagnose, upgrade, and maintain them. Due to different technical standards and complexities of protocols in the subnet, the management capabilities of gateways vary. A modular IoT gateway approach is proposed to manage different perception networks and applications, ensuring the use of a unified management interface technology for unified management of end network nodes.
Furthermore, it must have protocol conversion capabilities. Protocol conversion from different perception networks to access networks, unifying the standard format data from the lower layers, ensuring that protocols from different perception networks can be converted into unified data and signaling; parsing the data packets issued from the upper layer into signaling and control instructions recognizable by the perception layer protocol.
1. Integration of WLAN and IoT in the Medical Field
Smart healthcare is a new form of medical care in the IoT era, a product of the integration of IoT into medical applications. It can not only help hospitals monitor patients’ health in real-time but also effectively manage the entire hospital’s operations, saving social resources and greatly accelerating the operation speed of the healthcare system. Advanced medical IoT solutions will adopt unified IoT gateways that cover both WLAN and IoT, achieving hardware deployment integration. By using a single IoT business engine to manage both WLAN and IoT devices, and a single IoT platform to manage mobile healthcare and IoT services, it eliminates the worries of management and operation for healthcare clients, accelerating the pace of informationization, and becoming an effective support for smart healthcare.
Currently, the domestic “New H3C” can allow IoT terminals to reach into individual rooms, introducing IoT signals into the rooms, sensing various terminals and tags at the perception layer, and bringing data into the access layer through AP and RFID readers. The management layer includes IoT AC, IoT middleware MC, and network management systems, achieving centralized management of all terminals and tags.
2. Integration with Industrial Manufacturing
In the process of realizing the industrial IoT, gateways are essential devices for connecting to the cloud. In recent years, the explosive deployment of gateways has led to tons of networked data being uploaded to cloud platforms, which has also triggered data overload issues. However, machine learning in artificial intelligence quickly came into play, and these cloud-based machine learning models will provide manufacturers with clear prototypes that can be further developed to address various virtualization challenges posed by industrial IoT.
According to reports, the market demand for IoT gateways will continue to rise in 2017. In the wave of Industry 4.0, the current environment of software and hardware integration still requires time to mature the technology and industry chain. However, from the evident increase in demand for gateways across various vertical industries, the world of IoT has begun to take shape under the investment of leading companies.
The amount of data collected by the IoT can be enormous and must be processed within a short time frame, and sometimes machine learning must be included. For example, in a factory, if the gateway detects an abnormal sound from a motor, the machine must be able to determine whether there is a potential fault that needs to be checked.
3. Helping Aquaculture IoT Systems Achieve Architecture and Functionality
With the rapid development of IoT technology, informationization in facility aquaculture has become an important driving force for the production of facility aquaculture to develop towards intensification, high yield, high efficiency, and quality. The IoT utilizes wireless network technologies such as ZigBee to form wireless sensor networks that sense the water quality conditions of aquaculture farms, such as temperature, dissolved oxygen concentration, pH value, etc., and send this data in real-time to the IoT gateway.
A highly intelligent IoT gateway design includes two parts: hardware design and software design.
In addition to the above applications, highly intelligent IoT gateways will also be widely used in smart cities, smart grids, smart healthcare, smart transportation, and various industries. IoT gateways will play a very important role in the future IoT era.
Maxjet IsFit Gateway
The Maxjet IsFit gateway unit is an IoT frontend collection and aggregation node based on the IsFit framework, designed with application scenarios in mind, distilling commonly used collection quantities into basic configurations. The integrated, master-slave, and other forms of gateways provide flexible and diverse expansion methods and networking forms, while the design increases fault tolerance and redundancy, enhances lightning and static electricity protection levels, ensuring high reliability and cost-effectiveness.
The IsFit gateway, based on the IsFit framework, is a general-purpose gateway designed for the lifeline, access, and edge computing needs of industry IoT nodes, achieving modularization, flexibility, and fog computing. It provides various rich dedicated and universal interfaces, strong functional configuration interfaces, and a variety of compatible protocols, offering optical Ethernet interfaces, optional wireless access methods such as 2G/3G/4G/WIFI/LoRa, local storage capabilities, remote download of operating programs and smart device communication protocol programs, self-diagnostic and fault self-location capabilities, web browsing capabilities, and support for intelligent device bottom or central parsing functions.
Libit T260S Industrial Grade 3G/4G Wireless Router
The T260S is a high-performance wireless communication product developed by Shenzhen Libit Technology Co., Ltd. based on 3G/4G network requirements. It is mainly used for data transmission services for industry users, supporting transparent data transmission, image transmission, device monitoring, and wireless internet access.
The T260S uses a high-performance 32-bit processor that can process protocols and large amounts of data at high speed and can be paired with various 3G/4G industrial modules (WCDMA/EVDO/TD-SCDMA/FDD-LTE/TD-LTE networks). It provides 10/100M Ethernet ports, WIFI wireless interfaces, serial ports, and USB interfaces. It can interface with various terminal devices.
Supports web configuration methods, making management easy and simple, and supports remote SMS control.
Alien Technology UHF RFID Reader and Gateway Device ALR-F800-X
The ALR-F800-X is both a UHF reader device and a gateway device, capable of collecting data from four additional Alien readers, interpreting that information, and forwarding it to the server.
This new device is equipped with Emissary software, allowing users to create logical names for each reader, antenna, and peripheral device in the ALR-F800-X network, and their locations. For example, users can name devices (such as: Dock Door 4 or Conveyor 5) instead of using traditional serial number identifiers.
However, the device is still in beta testing with multiple companies and is expected to be available for sale in July 2017.
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