Design and Implementation of a Multiprotocol IoT Gateway

In the coming years, the interconnection of a large number of devices is expected, which will lead to a new form of interaction between the real and the virtual world. In this promising scenario, known as the Internet of Things, it is expected that different objects, such as sensors, industrial robots, cars, appliances, will be connected to the Internet. One of the main challenges of the Internet of Things is the interoperability of highly heterogeneous devices, mainly in terms of the communication capabilities and network protocols used. As consequence, the interconnection model of the different devices involves an intermediary device, known as gateway. This gateway is a centralized element for the management of the devices that make up an IoT application. In addition, it is essential for the transmission of information to the Internet, especially when many IoT devices are not IP-based. This paper describes the implementation of an IoT gateway that allows the exchange of data through different wireless technologies and forwarding of such data to the Internet. The proposed gateway has important advantages such as: supporting for multiprotocol interconnectivity; remote configuration of wireless nodes for sensor and actuators management; a flexible algorithm to translate the data obtained by sensors into a uniform format for transmission to a cloud server; low energy consumption due to efficient data transfer over the MQTT protocol. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of the developed gateway, a proof-of-concept test was implemented. The implemented scenario consists of 2 wireless nodes responsible for sensing environmental variables and transmitting data to the gateway node through different communication protocols. The obtained results show the feasibility for simultaneous data transmission from the remote wireless nodes to the gateway.