Reconfigurable IoT Gateway Based on a SDR Platform

Abstract

The current enabler for Internet of Things (IoT) are short-range terrestrial communications embedded on affordable, low-power wireless devices that have as their main drawback the necessity to be connected to a specific gateway that enables them to communicate with the world. The variety of communication standards which are currently used in the IoT world, poses difficulties for having a single device able to act as a gateway for the most important wireless standards. A Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform can be a perfect solution for a single, reconfigurable device. The paper proposes a general architecture for an IoT Gateway and describes the implementation of the architecture as a fully functional prototype for a IoT gateway based on an embedded SDR platform. The developed prototype, implemented as a standalone RF platform, is able to route data to and from M2M/IoT applications, covering the most common short-range wireless protocols and standards (802.11 b/g/n, ZigBee, BLE, LoRa, etc). By implementing the above-mentioned wireless protocols on a SDR platform and using its RF capabilities together with a sniffing procedure, these wireless protocols can be detected by the SDR gateway and subsequently communication can be configured to enable transmission between the end devices and external infrastructure, using IP-based packet communication through the means of an MQTT broker. A control interface manages all the gateway activities, provides statistics and ensures human intervention in the system.