Gateways provide valuable networking, computational, and storage support for the Internet of Things. This gateway platform is an extensible architecture that supports multiple communication protocols, backend storage options, system monitoring tools, and user interaction options, while enabling rapid prototyping of new gateway services. Two core ideas underly this gateway architecture: 1) devices should be automtically supported when in range of the gateways, and 2) data streams provided by the gateway should be easily interpretable.
This gateway provides many common services for embedded devices and sensors, an environment for running applications local to the gateway, and standard MQTT topics for retreiving the data streams. To promote scalability, each node points to a method for interpreting its own data and appending metadata. This allows the gateway to automatically adapt to new devices without being manually configured. After devices are discovered and their data packets are interpretted, the gateway creates a data stream which can be published to the cloud, displayed to users, or fed to an application.
This project has several goals:
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Provide gateway layer functionality for a range of devices. It should not be specific to just some projects.
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Be as generic as possible. All device specific logic should be developed elsewhere and pulled in only when a relevant device is discovered.
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Expose data streams in a low-friction manner. This means making them available over common protocols and in a self-describing data format.
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Relay data streams to interested services. These could be local to the gateway or cloud hosted endpoints.
The gateway stack is a series of discrete modules linked
by MQTT. Roughly, each folder in /software is a
separate module.
The gateway is being developed as a part of the Urban Heartbeat Kit Project. More documentation on how to use a running gateway can be found there.
If you have a SwarmGateway, you can get data from it quickly. Install Mosquitto, then:
mosquitto_sub -h swarmgateway.local -t gateway-data
to get the full data stream. If you are not on the same network, pass -h
the correct IP address.
You can also see a load a status page in a web browser: swarmgateway.local.
This is a list of other projects in the gateway vein. Some have concepts that directly influenced this gateway design, some are hardware platforms that this gateway supports, and others just play a role in the gateway tier.
- IoT Gateway: Leverage smartphones to forward BLE advertisements.
- CloudComm: Eventual data delivery to the cloud over BLE.
- PowerBlade: Collect BLE advertisements from PowerBlade devices.
- GAP: Add 802.15.4 hardware support to the BeagleBone Black.
- Edison Based Gateway: Gateway hardware based on the Intel Edison.