Open-source multi-protocol gateway for Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming increasingly ubiquitous with global applicability in a very wide spectrum of commercial sectors, making use of diverse technologies for custom usage in certain environments. The diversity of applications and protocols and the custom needs for each environment introduce a big challenge for IoT applications, demanding the support of communication and message exchanges in implementations that aggregate diverse protocols. The paper addresses the design of an open-source multiprotocol gateway which supports two communication protocols, namely, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and LoRa. The proposed gateway represents the bridge between the devices and the network server and transports the received messages via a standard format readable by the network server. The messages between the gateway and the network server are transported over the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. The paper details the implementation of the proposed multi-protocol gateway and highlights its benefits. In particular, the proposed gateway demonstrates support for multiple protocols on the same hardware base and eliminates the need of using multiple hardware components for each type of protocol.