What is an IoT gateway? What functions does the IoT gateway have?

The IoT gateway plays a very important role in the IoT era. It is the link between the sensing network and the traditional communication network. Between the two different networks of the IoT perception layer and network layer, the IoT gateway serves as an intermediate device and is mainly used to collect data, sense information and communicate with the network.

The smart gateway mainly implements the following three functions:

1. Ability to perceive network access

The IoT gateway first has the function of obtaining information such as the attributes and status of each node, that is, it can sense the real-time status of each node. Secondly, it has functions such as remote control, wake-up, and diagnosis of nodes, that is, automatic management of nodes.

2. Standardization of communication and data formats

The gateway must implement protocol conversion from the sensor network to the traditional communication network, uniformly encapsulate the standard format data transmitted on the protocol adaptation layer, unpack the data sent by the wide area access layer into standard format data, and realize command parsing. , and then converted into signals and control instructions that can be recognized by the perception layer protocol.

3. Ability to interoperate with heterogeneous networks

IoT gateway access inevitably requires cross-domain communication, so perfect addressing technology is needed to ensure that the information of all nodes can be located and queried accurately, efficiently, and safely. With the development of IoT applications, the number of node addresses will gradually increase, and its encoding structure is different from the domain name structure in DNS. Therefore, a set of addressing technology different from the Internet is needed to meet the needs.

Summarize

IoT gateways have been an essential element of consumer and industrial IoT architectures for many years, and are arguably the most important architectural component. The IoT gateway can integrate the data collected by different terminals and transmit it to the next level to complete the transmission of information between various levels; the IoT gateway can implement sensing networks and communication networks, as well as different types of sensing Protocol conversion between networks; the IoT gateway can realize both wide area network communication and local area network communication.