Multiple protocol transport network gateway for IoT systems

Abstract

Exchange data among devices in machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems is an essential feature for these systems. For the sake of simplicity and reliability, many M2M and IoT solutions support homogeneous/single network deployment. However, when the complexity of the system and the number of device vendors continue to grow, it is challenging, if not impossible, to build M2M and IoT systems with devices using single communication protocol. The targeted problem of this paper is to enable the communication among devices in heterogeneous networks. Multiple Protocol Transport Network (MPTN) gateway is designed to be a distributed messaging gateway to enable messaging among multiple networks. To leverage the routing capability in existing network protocols, MPTN gateway converts an end-to-end message request to a multiple segment message based on network topology. The protocol schedules periodic routing table update to pro-actively keep the routing table up to dates with long time intervals, and allows on-demand route update to shorten the delay on topology and connectivity change. The performance evaluation results show that the protocol completes table update within tens of milliseconds when there are more than ten devices in a system.