Implementation and Performance Analysis of a Multi-Protocol Gateway

Internet of things (IoT) allows devices with resource constraints such as low processing capability and low power consumption to connect to a network and collect, store and share data from these devices. The aim of this study is to report the performance of a multi-protocol gateway having various communication technologies for IoT applications. For this purpose, a multi-protocol gateway is designed using different wireless network communication technologies such as ZigBee, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth low energy (BLE). While ESP32 S-WROOM is preferred as the IoT device, Raspberry Pi 4 is used as the gateway. Data is sent from ESP32 IoT devices to the gateway via Wi-Fi mesh, ZigBee, and BLE. Communication of the IoT devices is provided via message queue telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol and Mosquitto (broker) that runs on the gateway. The data coming to the gateway is recorded and reported on MongoDB together with the communication technology information. In the final output of our study, the software, and the hardware used in the multi-protocol gateway design with various communication technologies are mentioned and the test environment is realized. In the scope of this study, performance is measured by increasing the number of devices with the communication technologies used to observe how data transmission will affect performance when high traffic occurs. Thus, this result allows us to decide the effective number of devices to be used in the Wi-Fi mesh design for minimum message loss and delay.