Unified SNMP Interface for IoT Monitoring

Internet of Things (IoT) is a network connecting various devices like sensors, actuators, and intelligent gadgets that monitor and control temperature, light, humidity, electrical power, and other physical quantities in a smart environment such as smart buildings. Data provided by IoT devices are essential for the management of the smart environment. So, it is important to be aware of the reachability of connected IoT devices, their state, volume of transferred data, connections they make, etc. Unfortunately, many IoT devices communicate directly over the data link layer (Layer 2) as ZigBee, Bluetooth, or WiFi. Traditional network monitoring techniques like SNMP, Netflow, or Syslog, however, require the full TCP/IP stack, so they cannot be directly applied on IoT networks. IoT devices are managed independently through vendor-specific solutions mostly implemented in the cloud. This leads to the divided network management where IP network devices are managed by a central network management system (NMS) while IoT devices are managed separately using proprietary applications. In order to include IoT devices into the network monitoring, two steps are required: (i) obtain IoT monitoring data, (ii) present these data in a standardized format supported by a common NMS. In this paper, we propose a solution based on the SNMP Proxy Agent that collects IoT information from IoT communication and the IoT log file on a local gateway. The agent converts gathered data into MIB objects that are provided to the SNMP monitoring system. Thus, information about IoT devices are fed to the locally deployed network management system. The paper demonstrates the proposed solution on the smart building where IoT data is obtained from MQTT packets and the Home Assistant log file.