Device microagent for IoT home gateway: a lightweight plug-n-play architecture

Abstract

Smart home implementation in IoT involves practical challenges of management and scalability of connecting various non IP end-devices i.e. sensors and actuators behind the connnected home gateway. While there are separate standards for interaction between IoT service to home gateway and gateway to variety of end-devices there remains disconnect regarding how this two ends meet in an adaptable and scalable way. In this paper we present an light-weight, loosly coupled architecture for IoT smart home gateway whereby end-devices can be added dynamically on the gateway without disrupting long haul communication between IoT cloud service and gateway. The gateway agent exchanges data through sensor-block or actuator-block with end-devices via device microagents and the protocol specific read-write task is offloaded to individual device microagent. This hybrid approach to integrate MQTT pub/sub flexibility with LWM2M RESTful adaptability results in a design of plug-n-play modular agent architecture for home gateway management in IoT applications.