Transforming mobile devices into smart IOT gateways

Abstract

Internet of Things (IOT) which is considered as the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’ is a heavily discussed topic across the globe which is all about inter-connection of things for the betterment of the human beings. Apart from the end nodes which are either sensors or actuators, a reliable and robust connection is the most significant component of any IOT deployment. Therefore, different concepts of IOT gateways have been introduced by many IOT vendors to the industry to cater various types of connectivity options. However, still there are major challenges and weaknesses prevailing in the industry, often in the connectivity component unanswered which have limited the full potential of IOT deployments. This research is focused on prototyping a smarter IOT gateway using an Android based mobile device which can overcome some of these limitations identified. nRF51822 Bluetooth based sensor tag which gives five different sensor readings and a cloud instance of Splunk IOT Data Analytics platform were used along with the Prototype gateway to demonstrate an actual IOT deployment in this research. The prototype successfully managed to push processed and filtered sensor data into the Splunk cloud which significantly reduced the data load which saved cloud storage. A python-based application was used to process the raw sensor data to meaningful information. In addition to that this prototype added value to the IOT gateways, by having features such as real-time alerting leveraging on Google Cloud Messaging services. However, using Android based mobile devices as IOT gateways created new set of limitations where few recommendations such as developing hardware-addons to accept other wireless IOT connectivity technologies and customizing the Android OS etc. were proposed towards the end of this research.