Dynamic Edge Access System in IoT Environment

Edge computing has enabled extensive reasoning capabilities at the edge of the network. Edge nodes have direct access to edge sources (e.g., sensors, devices) to read and process relevant data, while each sensor/device manufacturer uses their bespoke protocols in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, hence, addressing compatibility problems to ensure seamless access has become a cumbersome task. A conventional solution is to save all sensor/device protocols in an edge node, however, which brings higher redundancy and hardware expenditure. Hence, we propose a dynamic edge access system (DEA) built on a collaborative IoT architecture. It solves the compatibility issues with low redundancy by customizing access programs. Besides, embedded programmable logic controllers are designed as edge nodes and have been applied in around 78 000 base stations. After implementing DEA, the analysis illustrates that the average improvement of every station’s protocol utilization is 96.3% and 66.6%, while the memory footprint is decreased to 4.5% and 33.3% compared with the conventional solution and global dynamic reconfiguration method.