Understanding IoT Gateways: A Comprehensive Guide

Compared to the Internet era, the communication protocols of the IoT are more diverse, and the fragmentation of items is quite severe, which highlights the importance of gateways—IoT gateways can integrate the information collected from different items and transmit it to the next level, allowing information to be transmitted between different parts.

Walking from one room to another inevitably requires passing through a door. Similarly, sending information from one network to another must pass through a “gateway.” A gateway is also known as an inter-network connector or protocol converter.

In the IoT architecture, an intermediate device is needed between the perception layer and the network layer of two different networks, which is the “IoT gateway.” As a gateway device, the IoT gateway can achieve protocol conversion between the perception network and the communication network, as well as between different types of perception networks, enabling both wide-area and local interconnection. Additionally, IoT gateways need to have device management capabilities, allowing operators to manage the underlying perception nodes, understand the relevant information of each node, and achieve remote control.

In the Internet, a gateway is an intermediate device that connects an internal network with other networks on the Internet, also known as a “router.” In the IoT architecture, an intermediate device is needed between the perception layer and the network layer of two different networks, which is the “IoT gateway.” The similarity between a gateway and a router is that they can both be used to regulate traffic between two or more independent networks. However, routers are used to connect two similar types of networks, while gateways connect two different networks. Due to this logic, routers may be considered gateways, but gateways are not always considered routers. Routers are the most commonly used gateways for connecting home or business networks to the Internet.

Currently, there are many technical standards used for short-range communication, and standardization work for IoT gateways is underway both domestically and internationally, such as 3GPP and sensor working groups, to achieve interconnectivity of various communication technology standards.

Powerful management capabilities are essential for any large-scale network. First, the gateway needs to be managed, such as registration management, permission management, and status monitoring. The gateway manages the nodes within the subnet, such as obtaining node identifiers, status, attributes, energy, and achieving remote wake-up, control, diagnosis, upgrade, and maintenance. Due to different technical standards of subnets, the complexity of protocols varies, so the management capabilities of gateways differ. A modular IoT gateway approach is proposed to manage different perception networks and applications, ensuring that a unified management interface technology can be used to manage the edge network nodes.

Protocol conversion from different perception networks to access networks, unifying the encapsulation of standard format data from the lower layer, ensuring that the protocols of 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.

All networks have a boundary that limits communication with devices directly connected to it. Therefore, if a network wants to communicate with devices, nodes, or networks outside that boundary, they need the functionality of a gateway. Gateways are often referred to as a combination of routers and modems. Gateways operate at the edge of the network and manage all data directed to or from that network. When a network wants to communicate with another network, data packets are sent to the gateway and routed to their destination via the most efficient path. In addition to routing data, gateways also store information about the paths within the host network and any other networks encountered. Gateways essentially act as protocol converters, facilitating compatibility between two protocols and operating at any layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. One use of a gateway is to create a communication link between IoT environments and the cloud. IoT gateways will play a very important role in the future IoT era, becoming the link between perception networks and traditional communication networks, with more diverse application scenarios.

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