Why IoT Gateway is an Indispensable Part of Modern Industrial IoT Architecture
IoT has revolutionized industrial operations in the last decade. It is prominent across a wide range of industries including manufacturing, transportation, renewable energy, logistics, mining, and more.
Industrial IoT (IIoT) brings together a network of sensors, gateways, cloud infrastructure, end-user applications and people to enhance industrial business models, improve efficiency, reduce downtime and digitize end-to-end operations.
Central to the IoT infrastructure is the manner in which data is generated within the ecosystem and efficiently transported to its destination in a secure manner. The analytics of this data provides avenues for intelligent decision making.
Key Components of an Industrial IoT Architecture
Sensor Network — Industrial IoT devices are retrofitted with sensor technology that collects data from the devices. Data related to device location, motion, temperature, pressure, etc. can be collected by the sensors. For example, in a solar energy plant, controllers with sensors can be fitted onto the field-deployed solar panels to align them with the movement of the Sun. This ensures that the solar panels are always exposed to the Sun in an angle suitable for maximum energy absorption.
IoT Gateway — Industrial IoT gateway plays the role of a bridge that connects the sensor network with the IoT cloud platform.
Cloud Server — In the industrial IoT infrastructure, the cloud server performs complex data processing and analytics.
End-user Applications — Intuitive end-user applications such as web apps or mobile apps help human operators to control and monitor industrial devices, even from remote locations.
Why are Gateways Important in Any Industrial IoT Solution?
Industrial IoT gateways support a wide range of functions to improve the efficiency of industrial operations. Let’s take a look at few of these:
1) Collecting data and communication — The data from the sensor nodes are collected by the IoT gateway and transmitted through the communication channel to the cloud.
2) Ensuring compatibility — The IoT gateway ensures compatibility between the sensor network and the cloud, so that the data can be transmitted seamlessly.
3) IoT device monitoring — The industrial IoT gateway enables operators to easily monitor the connected devices and track asset health. This helps teams to move away from reactive maintenance or calendar-based maintenance and adopt more efficient predictive maintenance strategies.
4) Fortifying security — The gateway performs device authentication for secure network access.
5) Data processing in real time — When the gateway functions as an Edge computing device, it can leverage the power of AI to process data and make intelligent decisions locally. Since the data is not transmitted to the cloud for processing, time-critical applications thrive well with industrial IoT gateways that perform edge computing. Such edge devices effectively reduce the network latency and minimise the strain on the cloud.
Conclusion
IoT gateways play a significant role in the success of an IIoT implementation. Incorrect choice of a gateway device can result in various implementation issues such as scalability challenges and faulty deployment.
It is, hence, advisable to carefully analyse your business use case and custom-design an IoT gateway most suitable for your organization. But make sure that you partner with a reliable IoT engineering services provider to accomplish this task.
