IoT: A Universal Dynamic Gateway

The use of IoT devices and services in consumer applications and industry has dramatically increased recently. The rapid technological innovations in sensors and other networks have resulted in the adoption of these devices in a wide range of application domains. This has, however, made the network highly heterogeneous in terms of communication protocols and data models and, as a result, difficult to scale up and integrate new devices with the existing ones, and to share gateway within the edge of the network. To address these challenges, there is a need for a system that can, in a dynamic way, incorporate these differences and at the same time guarantee the security of the data to be transmitted. In this work, to integrate these devices, we propose a multi-application and multi-protocol gateway which uses containerized applications to isolate different roles of the system as well as MQTT for all components communications and JSON as a data model for application management and information exchange. The use of containers makes the gateway dynamic as different roles of code can be downloaded and run. It also ensures improved safety since the failure of code running in one container does not impact the whole gateway. With the isolation of applications, access, and protocols, security is, as well, enhanced. The proposed gateway is designed, in analogy to Syslog-ng log architecture which is based on source, filter, and destination, to process the workflow of filters and work near the connected devices as an edge device that connects to the devices using both IP and non-IP protocols. The proposed gateway is universal and highly portable as new connection protocols can be added by implementing and running new containers without the need to reconfigure its internal structure.