Watson IoT Platform Gateway capabilities now Generally Available

IOT platform gateway provides extra functionality and control over connected devices and sensors.

• Single Connection – With a single sign-in and connection, a gateway can send events and receive commands on behalf of its registered devices using their device ids.
• Device Management – a Gateway can forward device management commands such as ‘reboot’ and ‘firmware update’ to attached devices, and to itself.
• Automatic Registration – Gateways can automatically register new devices that connect to them with the IoT Platform.

What is a gateway?

Simply put, a gateway is an intermediary between one or more Things and the internet.

IOT platform using Gateway:

IoT platform using gateway can connect and manage a range of Things as a group, while still maintaining the same granular level of individual control. Things connected through a gateway are uniquely identified in the platform, even if the Thing is a simple sensor without an IP address. This way all Things can temporarily disconnect or freely roam through the available gateways without affecting the integrity of your IoT solution.

Depending on your architecture, a gateway may be passive like a hub; or active like a router. A passive gateway is transparent to your architecture, it just allows sensor readings to flow up, and commands to flow down to the device. An active gateway gets involved in transferring the data – for example when the device is not IP enabled like a bluetooth, zigbee or LPWAN device, a gateway can identify the device and help it transmit data back and from the internet.

A number of gateway providers have become early adopters of this technology and have it working with their gateway technology today, including:

• Yanzi – http://www.yanzinetworks.com/
• Libelium – http://www.libelium.com/
• Adlinktech – http://www.adlinktech.com/

Whether you are an IoT solution architect, a gateway producer, firmware writer, or producer of any device which provides data on behalf of other devices, then you’ll want to take advantage of these new features.  Even if you’re already using a gateway today, you will find it simpler to add new devices and get started working with their data in the IoT Platform!