A Mobile Multi-Technology Gateway to Enable IoT Interoperability

In the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, all our everyday objects will be equipped with processing, sensing and actuating capabilities and need to be connected to the Internet to provide their full potential benefits. Our life will be surrounded by an ecosystem of smart things that need to be found, accessed, managed and interconnected to other things. For that purpose, we introduce an IoT Gateway solution based on a smartphone becoming a universal interface between the Internet and the Things. We propose a high-level, unified and extendible smartphone software architecture for thing discovery/management and for data collection, processing and forwarding to Internet and Cloud. We evaluated the feasibility of the proposed solution, throughout the implementation of a specific testbed. System performances are evaluated in terms of energy consumption, CPU and memory usage. Obtained results validated the soundness of the proposed approach presenting a low usage of hardware resources even if, the consumption introduced by the radio interfaces and the reduced capacity of current batteries, significantly limit the smartphone lifetime. This latter aspect will certainly be exceeded in a short time since the technological progress daily produces more efficient radio interfaces and batteries.