Field gateway and AWS IoT Cloud

Very often devices are resource constrained.
For example, if you’re building a prototype using a (compatible) Arduino Uno, you have only few 100-kbs of memory to write your sketch.

This means that not always your devices are capable of supporting TLS and establishing a direct connection to an IoT Cloud Service.

In other cases, you don’t want a direct connection, for example for security reasons.

In this case, the recommended topology is based on the adoption of a “Field Gateway”. Your devices are directly connected to the gateway, they send messages to the gateway and the gateway forward these messages to the IoT Cloud Service.

If you’re using (and this is a good and one of the most commonly used approach) MQTT, then you can install a local MQTT broker on the gateway and use the “Bridge functionality” to relay messages from the local broker to the MQTT broker provided by the IoT Cloud Service.

If you plan to make use of Amazon AWS IoT Cloud, here you can find a well-made guide to configure the bridge. The local broker is Eclipse Mosquito.

https://aws.amazon.com/it/blogs/iot/how-to-bridge-mosquitto-mqtt-broker-to-aws-iot/

(updated on 30/12/2016).