Design and Implementation of a Multiconnectivity IoT Modem for Highly Reliable Consumer Applications

A reliable network transmission is essential for consumer wireless Internet of Thing (IoT) applications. The multihoming technology is proposed to enhance the network reliability through multiple network connections. However, the multihoming technology is not inherently supported by the network protocols that are widely used in IoT devices. This article presents the design and implementation of a multihoming IoT modem based on the embedded platform. Specifically, a software framework with failover mechanism is designed for supporting multihoming network under conventional protocols such as user datagram protocol (UDP), transmission control protocol (TCP), and transport layer security (TLS). Furthermore, a novel buffer management scheme is presented to minimize the packets loss in the IoT device caused by network failover. Based on the proposed software framework, an IoT multihoming modem is implemented. This proposed modem can handle the connections of IoT devices and automatically complete network failover. The experiment results show that, compared to conventional modem, the proposed IoT multihoming modem, let IoT devices, transparently achieve highly reliable transmission for UDP, TCP, and TLS protocols.