In telecommunications, the primary purpose of a gateway is to provide a bridge between different types of communication technologies. These technologies may vary in connection types, interfaces, or protocols. For example, your home Internet gateway (router) connects your local area network (LAN) to your Internet Service Provider (WAN).
In the IoT world, we also have such 'routers', we call them 'IoT gateways' and they play a crucial role in collecting data from sensors at the edge of the network and normalizing this data for sharing in the Sectron Cloud service. The gateway thus creates a kind of 'bridge' between the sensors / actuators and the Internet itself. Alternatively, they work in such a way that devices that previously could not be connected to the Internet and communicated via some already archaic interface (eg: older boilers, air conditioning, recuperation units) can be modernized and breathe new life into them thanks to these specialized converters!
What are the key features of IoT Gateway?
Most IoT devices in networks today are able to aggregate data. (For example, automotive sensors can aggregate data and send it to the cloud analytics service.) However, to achieve the cloud service itself, these 'stupid' sensors must first send all this raw data to the IoT Gateway.
The basic feature of such a gateway is therefore Communication bridging. Reading data from the sensor using some standardized bus or protocol and then sending this measured data to the cloud service. However, the IoT gateway also serves as a buffer providing a location for storing data in the event of a network failure, so that there is no gap in the measured data. After reconnecting, the gateway sends all this stored data back to the cloud and automatically fills in the data failure.
In many cases, sensor data can be unreliable or affected by different influences. IoT gateways have the ability to pre-process data and send clean and filtered data without unnecessary waste of the data packet, which is always significantly limited in the case of IoT devices. An additional benefit is also greater energy savings if the modem does not unnecessarily transmit data that would be discarded on the side of the cloud service. Gateway also provides sophisticated security techniques, using specialized hardware chips (so-called: Secure Elements) can perform configuration security directly at the hardware level (thus preventing data leakage or unauthorized access to devices).
The motto of our company is 'Connecting devices to bring the future now' and therefore we will soon offer you these key elements that will help you connect your existing and new devices to the world of the Internet.
