The IoT Gateway is the core of all intelligent connected device. The gateway needs to make the IoT devices available in the network world and allow them to be connected to cloud servers. The IoT gateway also manages device configurations, verifies devices for secure access, and supports edge analysis. Finally, the gateway needs to provide compatibility across all connected devices by supporting a variety of connection protocols, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, LoRa, and so on.

 

 Here are five best practices for establishing IoT gateways.

1. Security is the primary task.

In today's world that cyber security threats continuously evolve, the primary task of establishing an IoT gateway should be security. All IoT devices should set authentication expiration times, edge gateways, and associated access keys.

Another way to enhance the IoT gateway that has been verified is to use a trusted execution environment and a trusted platform module both. TEE ensures that all sensitive data in the connected device is processed, stored, and protected in a trusted isolated environment. This enables end-to-end security by enhancing privacy, system integrity, data confidentiality and authenticity, and data access rights. TEE is popular for its high accessible memory and high processing speed. 

 

2. Use gateway cluster to achieve continuity

Cluster also helps ensure that information received from legacy nodes and IoT devices is transmitted without losing data. To reduce these risks, cluster interconnects multiple gateway devices. An IoT gateway device cluster should be installed between all the source and target nodes. This creates a mesh network of devices and ensures redundancy. This means that if a gateway node fails or crashes, communication continuity is still available. If the IoT gateway fails, connections and application programs are transferred to adjacent gateways.

 

3. Configuration management

The gateway should support remote configuration and management. Use a human-machine interface system to provide remote and useful configuration management, and the operator can see the overall view of the system, including fault systems, high error rates, and so on.

 

4. Avoid excessive data load through load balancing.

 To reduce data overload, load balancing is achieved by using cluster managers that manage the distribution of network data. The cluster manager can define threshold occupancy for each gateway. When the IoT gateway exceeds the defined threshold, the cluster manager transfers the excess load to the adjacent gateway. This ensures balanced load distribution and faster network response.

 

5. Use horizontal and vertical scaling

Add additional gateway devices to support scalability and redundancy, you can choose to scale horizontally or vertically.

A gateway can be added to a network by connecting it to an existing communication bus. The benefit is that there is no need to overhaul the network, and horizontal scaling is the ideal solution for pure scalability. Another option to be considered is vertical scaling. Vertical scaling should be used when functional changes need to be implemented. Functional changes include:

Operation system update

Hardware upgrade

Industrial automation software upgrade

To ensure that the IoT gateway supports vertical scaling, please make sure that the architecture includes a micro-service application.

 

Conclusion

It is not easy to establish an IoT gateway. Since the gateway is the core of industrial IoT, it is important to follow all best practices, in this way, a maintainable, scalable, and reliable environment can be designed. Use the USRIOT Modbus gateway, the host mode of M511 is divided into Modbus_RTU_MasterModbus_ASC_Master mode. One master - one slave transmission, one master - multiple slaves transmission and multiple masters-multiple slaves transmission can be realized in both host modes.

In the transmission process, Modbus gateway module does not analyze any protocol, but only sends the serial data to the network end. In the slave mode, it can connect to the 16-way network host with full load, support the function of pre-reading (i.e. caching), save the transmission time of serial port, and frequently query data without timeout.