The IoT offers endless possibilities for optimising business, improving health and safety, saving time and money, and making life better. However, bringing new solutions to the market and integrating them into complex IoT ecosystems is a huge challenge. IoT networks handle incoming data from large numbers of IoT Devices (IoTDs) to IoT Gateways. Sensors for health applications, smart meters, the monitoring of remote areas which are of difficult access, and the monitoring of large civil engineering structures are a few of the numerous applications covered by the Internet of Things (IoT). These networks of connected devices of different types also address the needs of autonomous systems, smart cities and smart vehicles.
Simply put, an IoT gateway is a physical device or virtual platform that connects sensors, IoT modules, and smart devices to the cloud. Gateways serve as a wireless access portal to give IoT devices access to the Internet. On the surface, it may sound like a simple router, enabling communication between different protocols and devices. But IoT Gateways are sophisticated technology that does so much more, like edge-computing in particular. The IoT Gateway is, therefore, a network element that co-ordinates and enables full and seamless interoperability among highly heterogeneous devices, which may operate different protocols at the link and/or application layers; may not be aware of the true nature of the nodes providing services and resources; and may be geographically distant.
Gateways Also Provide Security To The Data Flowing To The Cloud
The IoT Gateway follows the same principle of bridging communications for different technologies. It creates a bridge between the IoT sensors/actuators and the Internet. The IoT gateway aggregates all data, translates sensor’s protocols, and pre-process the data before sending it. The sensor nodes are connected with connectivity protocols like LoRa, zigbee, etc and all the data of node devices is collected at the gateway. IoT gateways can depend on Ethernet, WiFi, or on cellular technology like GSM, LTE, NBIoT, or LTE-M for their network connectivity to send data further to the cloud. IoT gateways use protocols such as MQTT, HTTP/S, REST, TCP, etc to send data to the cloud. The gateways can be controlled based or can even possess a processor which adds to modulation and modification of the functioning, speed, and computing capability.
A simple way to conceive of an IoT Gateway is to compare it to your home or office network router or gateway. Such a gateway facilitates communication between your devices, maintains security and provides an admin interface where you can perform basic functions. The aim of an IoT gateway is to make sense of all the data (Big Data) which is available from connected ‘things’ on a desired network. These ‘things’ can be factory machinery, renewable energy technology, vehicles, household appliances or any device of any kind with useful data to obtain and digest. Sensors connected to all of these ‘things’ collect data such as speed, temperature, fuel levels, noise, vibration, light, timings and so on. An IoT gateway then processes this data at the EDGE (closer to the data source) of this activity, distributing the information or even reacting to learned outcomes.
Watchnet IoT Gateway, Watchnet IoT Interface
Applications of an IoT Gateway
The primary objective of an IoT Gateway is to connect the IoT nodes to the internet. Additionally, gateways can perform local processing on the data received from nodes before sending it to the external service thus offloading the CPU of the nodes to allow them to be simple, cost effective and power efficient. Gateway can also perform data aggregation and analytics (edge analytics) on the data from multiple nodes. Local analytics has many benefits like lower latency, reduced network bandwidth usage and preserving privacy. Some applications which require IoT gateways are listed below.
IoT Gateway and Industrial Management
Industrial manufacturing using IoT technology will have immense benefits for businesses. It will enable the ongoing measurement and control of industrial processes, reducing waste and ensuring accurate control of product quality. Industrial computers will be able to better automate process management and increase production efficiency. IoT gateways typically gather data from sensors, devices, and machinery. After gathering the data, IoT gateways process the data and analyse it, sending processed data to the cloud for remote monitoring, remote control, and post-analysis. Essentially, Industrial IoT gateways serve as computers that allow devices and sensors to communicate with one another, as well as communicate information to the cloud. They are similar to routers found in most homes, facilitating communication between devices, as well as between them and the internet.
However, IoT gateways are capable of so much more in terms of processing, memory, and storage capacity in close proximity to sensory data. The major advantage of deploying industrial IoT gateways is that they alleviate the burden placed on the cloud and data centres from having to process the large volumes of data produced by sensors and IIoT devices. They are able to collect, filter, process, and analyse data locally, eliminating the need to send all of the raw data that’s collected to the cloud for processing and analysis. Additionally, industrial IoT gateways can be used to reduce human error and gain a wide variety of information that relates to the manufacturing process, allowing operators and organizations to use such information to optimize the production process.
IoT Gateway and Healthcare Management
With the acceleration of aging, demands for elder care services have increased dramatically. Gateway deployments for Internet of Things (IoT) play an important role to support such services over remote intelligent healthcare platforms, in particular when allowing patients wearing wireless medical devices to walk freely in wards or indoor spaces. The gateway deployment problem becomes much more complicated under this condition due to obstacles and human bodies in the way between the gateways and the patients. In addition, the hardware specification of a gateway and the signal shadowing by patients themselves also limit the connectivity capacity of a gateway.
Gateways generally act as a hub between a sensor layer and cloud services. With an in-depth observation of a gateway’s role in a smart hospital, where the mobility and location of users and things are confined to the hospital premises or the building, it can be noticed that the stationary nature of gateways empowers them with the luxury of being non-resource constrained in terms of processing power, power consumption and communication bandwidth. This paradigm, which is also called fog or edge computing enables the system to support seamless mobility, load balancing, efficient scalability, low-latency response, and developing applications utilizing services offered by multiple sensors and gateways, just to mention a few. Such a valuable characteristics can be exploited by reinforcing the gateways with sufficient processing power, intelligence, and orchestrated networking capabilities, thus becoming a smart e-Health gateway.
Iot Gateway And Agricultural Greenhouse Monitoring
The development of Internet technology has brought light to the development of agricultural modernization, agricultural Internet of things has become the inevitable trend of agricultural management. Through the remote monitoring and control of greenhouse, the greenhouse monitoring system realized the precise measurement and real time control of the greenhouse.
The IOT gateway is a join point of public network and wireless sensor network in greenhouse monitoring and control system. And the function of the gateway is realized data gathering, upload and processing remote user control information. The gateway is based on modularization method and the using of the method improved the compatibility and better meets the needs of complex agricultural environment. Through data monitoring and analysis, the remote monitoring system is able to remotely control the wet curtains, fans, spray and drip irrigation, internal and external sunshades, top and side windows, heaters and lights and other equipment to ensure that the greenhouse environment is most suitable for crop growth. The development process of gateway is loading boot program, transplanting the embedded operating system, transplanting the root file system, transplanting the embedded web server, running program, running the local GUI control application. It improves operational efficiency and system application flexibility by using the sensor network and at the same time reduces the manpower cost. The IoT gateway keeps fine the greenhouse monitoring system, the environment data of the greenhouse can transfer reliably, and the control instruction sent timely.
Iot Gateway And Smart Cities
IoT has the potential to tame the pressure of urbanization, create new experience for city residents, and make day-to-day living more comfortable and secure. The IoT system comprises two parts – a “tangible” part of IoT devices and network nodes and a cloud part. The data cannot simply pass from one part to the other. There must be doors – field gateways. Field gateways facilitate data gathering and compression by pre-processing and filtering data before moving it to the cloud. The cloud gateway ensures secure data transmission between field gateways and the cloud part of a smart city solution. State-of-the-art wireless technologies such as 5G and Wifi6 could also benefit from edge computing. Although 5G, as per 3GPP specification, could increase by up to x10 the speed of existing 4G communications, in reality, it would also rely on edge computing to dramatically reduce the network latency.
Empowered by edge computing, both wireless technologies can provide the right data rate and network capacity for bandwidth-demanding applications. And when it comes to SD-WAN, they can also be used to improve the availability and reliability of the network coverage. While much of the system and sub-system communication is achieved using typical infrastructure such as Ethernet and/or Wi-Fi networking, there are also significant requirements to support systems having more disparate sub-system nodes. These types of networks benefit from the use of an embedded Internet of Things (IoT) gateway that not only supports the various connection types to/from these disparate nodes and the upstream Ethernet, Wi-Fi or other, but can also provide much needed overhead processing to greatly offload the various nodes and reduce their design complexity. Since design complexity can directly relate to node cost and the proliferation of nodes is an axiom of IoT, the use of embedded IoT gateways is an important consideration in the proliferation of IoT and its long-term viability and success.
IoT Gateways and Emissions Monitoring
Accurate emissions monitoring is vital for oil and gas companies that need to meet new regulatory guidelines. One of the major challenges that energy producers face is monitoring and mitigating rogue emissions across a mix of legacy and modern assets. As different types of equipment enter the capital mix, the number of different components, parts, and subassemblies that must be monitored and maintained grows continuously. While modern assets may have built-in machine-to-machine communication capabilities, energy producers can get much more value if they’re able to extract and use asset data to drive condition monitoring and preventative maintenance. The real-time monitoring platform based on IoT technology realizes advance warning and decision making by using identifiable, capturable, and sharable data, And the platform can achieve the storage, query, analysis, mining and understanding of massive sensing data through Internet technology.
IoT gateways remove the barriers created by machine-specific languages and allows energy producers to attach sensors and actuators to nearly any asset or component for data collection. The gateway can send that device data from the edge to the cloud and make it available for technicians and site administrators to make maintenance decisions or even remotely control the asset. The IoT Gateway is an intelligent device connecting the sensor simulator to the Internet. It collects sensor data and sends the data to the cloud.
In developing IoT technologies for smart emission control and management, the major challenge revolves around embedding intelligence into common electrical devices, thus enabling them to perform autonomously and reliably. A secondary challenge is it involves coordinating the heterogeneous platforms of multiple devices and their unique features so that they function as a unified network for a comprehensive goal.
