Tuesday, December 29, 2015

IoT Gateway

An important component in an IoT Architecture is an IoT Gateway.

A Gateway is an important link between the world of Things and Sensors (and actuators) and the world of Enterprise Applications.

Normally connected things don't have the computing capabilities to run complex computation. Very often they don't have too much networking capabilities, but they are the best components to link to the physical world.
To avoid to put too much burden on the Things, in terms of computational capabilities and in term of networking we need something in between. This is an IoT Gateway.

As a part of my IoT training, I'm investigating what kind of software you can run on a "Open Source" IoT gateway.
For now, I have decided that the best platform to run a gateway is Raspberry Pi 2.

This is the liste of the software that I have successfully run on it:
  • Mosquitto (MQTT) broker;
  • Node.js;
  • Node-Red;
  • MySQL;
  • Redis;
  • Python;
  • Oracle Edge Analytics
I think that the best messaging solution, to connect sensor nodes with the Gateway is MQTT, and Mosquitto broker seems to work perfectly.