Demo abstract: Swarm gateway

The gateway is a key component for sensor network deployments and the Internet of Things. Sensor deployments often tend towards low-power communication protocols such as Bluetooth Low Energy or IEEE 802.15.4. Gateways are essential to connect these devices to the Internet at large. Over time though, gateways have gained additional responsibilities as well. Sensors expect gateways to handle device-specific data translation and local processing while also providing services, such as time synchronization, to the low-power device. As a centralized computing resource, the gateway is also an obvious location for running local applications which interact with sensor data and control nearby actuators. Today, vendors and researchers often create their own device-specific gateways to handle these responsibilities. We propose a generic gateway platform capable of supporting the needs of many devices. In our architecture, devices provide a pointer, such as a URL, to descriptions of their interfaces. The gateway can download the interface descriptions and use them to determine how to interact with the device, translating its data to a usable format and enabling local services to communicate with it. The translated data is provided to services including user applications, local logging, device status monitoring, and cloud applications. By simultaneously supporting communication with many sensors, our gateway architecture can simplify future sensor network deployments and enable intelligent building applications.