Gateway devices

IoT gateways play a key role in the convergence of IT and OT. IoT as popularly understood by the world is a technology that connects ‘things’ to the Internet. But often, these things do not have the capability to connect to an IoT platform on their own. In such cases, IoT gateways help devices to intersect or connect with the network, cloud or data center. These gateways can either be dedicated hardware or software programs.

Considering a use case of a connected office environment, there will be several sensors associated with equipment like lights, HVAC system, security systems, CCTVs, etc. These sensors are used to capture data such as:

Temperature
Luminosity
Noise
Position of people and equipment
Particles in the air

Each of these devices use different protocols like WiFi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet to connect to the network. They connect to different control environments and have different models for management and security. Some of these sensors or controllers might use low energy and may not support energy-intensive protocols like WiFi and Bluetooth, which may affect their connectivity.

IoT gateways come handy in such situations. They help in provisioning critical functions like:

Device connectivity
Protocol translation
Data filtering and processing
Security management

IoTConnect gateways’ roles and benefits

Enhanced connectivity and security

IoTConnect ensures the integrity of the network and system in both directions with secured IoT gateways.

Protocol and data bridge

With IoTConnect’s gateways, you can translate and transfer data of systems with different communications protocols and data formats.

You can read more about gateways in our user guide.

How to onboard Gateway Device

let’s consider we are building Smart conference room use case, which contains multiple air conditioners, lights, projectors. Those devices are not capable to send directly to the cloud, so you can add a gateway device that is capable to received data with different protocols like Bluetooth, the infrared, etc. gateway in the middle of the application who communicates with the legacy device and send it to IoTConnect.

Below are steps to implement gateway device

Define Device Template
Whitelist your Gateway and Add child device
Integrate SDK

Architecture

Define Device Template

When you create a template, you will find the require input details to create Template

Template Code – unique code for your templates
Template Name – Display name
Authentication Type – Select Device to cloud and cloud to a device authentication method for communicating
Gateway Support – Select to make Template with Gateway support, which enables one more field “Tag”
Tag – That value of Tag here is an identifier that this is gateway Device, not the child device, we will attach this tag in the attributes section.

Add Template attributes with tags, As per our use case, we will need to manage AC, Lights and Projector device using Gateway so we will need four tags for each type.

Attributes	Tag
GatewayCPU	GT
GatewayMemory	GT
Temperature 	AC
Humidity 	AC
Temperature	Light 
Luminosity	Light 
Voltage 	Projector

Define the command for all four types of devices that are connected to the gateway, in the example, switch on/off AC you need to select the proper tag to relate it.

Whitelisted your Device and add Child devices

Create a gateway device using selected the same template that we created in the last step. Once it’s created you can go into details of gateway device for creating child devices.