Multi-Protocol Gateway System for Heterogeneous Network on Internet of Things

Abstract

One of the main problems on the Internet of Things is heterogeneity. One of them is diversity in communication protocols. Generally, we will need one gateway for each existing protocol which causes inefficient communication networks. With these problems, we propose to build a hybrid network infrastructure using the Multi-Protocol Gateway system, this allows existing gateways to accept more than one protocol. This system is divided into two parts, hardware and software. For hardware systems, we use a single board processor equipped with the necessary transceiver modules. Our software system uses Python scripts to manage all backend processes, MySQL as data storage, PHP as a web server and Progressive Web Application (PWA) web application so that all devices get the same experience. We also provide a dashboard on the gateway to show and ensure that all data from different protocols can be received simultaneously in real-time. As a result, the gateway we developed can receive all data from four different protocols. We also evaluate the performance of the gateway by testing hardware capabilities by measuring the transmit time and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR). The result shows that all communication protocols show compliance with existing hardware specifications. In addition, we also test the load time performance of the PWA service and compare it to non-PWA. The load time on PWA is smaller than that of non-PWA, due to the fact that PWA has offline capabilities that can store caches temporarily so that the next load time will be lighter. Using hybrid network infrastructure with Multi-Protocol Gateway is the answer to the problem of the diversity of protocols that we often find in the implementation of IoT such as smart building, smart city and other smart environments, with the existence of this Multi-Protocol Gateway can make communication services in the IoT structure to be more efficient.