IGateLink: A Gateway Library for Linking IoT, Edge, Fog, and Cloud Computing Environments

Abstract

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been growing in popularity, along with the increasingly important role played by IoT gateways, mediating the interactions among a plethora of heterogeneous IoT devices and cloud services. In this paper, we present iGateLink, an open-source Android library easing the development of Android applications acting as a gateway between IoT devices and edge/fog/cloud computing environments. Thanks to its pluggable design, modules providing connectivity with a number of devices acting as data sources or fog/cloud frameworks can be easily reused for different applications. Using iGateLink in two case studies replicating previous works in the healthcare and image processing domains, the library proved to be effective in adapting to different scenarios and speeding up development of gateway applications, as compared to the use of conventional methods.