Gateways to Heaven: Observations and Predictions on the Software Architecture of IoT Gateways

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables connected devices that are an integral part of the physical world. The possibility to connect, manage, configure and dynamically reprogram remote devices through local and global cloud environments will open up a broad variety of new use cases, services, applications and device categories, and will enable entirely new product and application ecosystems as well. In this paper we discuss the software architecture options of IoT gateways as a follow-up to our earlier paper that defined a taxonomy of software architectures for IoT devices. We summarize several different software architecture options for IoT gateways. These options have a significant impact on the overall end-to-end architecture and topology of IoT systems, e.g., in determining how much computation can be performed on the edge of the network. Based on our observations and industry experiences we then make predictions on the future of gateway solutions and IoT systems more broadly.