IoT Catalyst simplifies the IoT

IoT ecosystems are rapidly expanding together with the number of “things” that can communicate between them and with IoT Platforms.

Conceptually, the IoT integration is pretty straightforward: you need to allow “things” to communicate with applications that are able to understand their languages and take decisions on the basis of what “things” communicated.

Practically, IoT practitioners need to cope with the countless edge communications protocols, the lack of standards in interfaces, the difficulty to have “things” talking to the upper level applications using APIs and SDKs in the most effective and efficient way, to reduce TCO.

The result is an extremely cumbersome process to collect, process and manage data in the cloud through complex low-level interfacing and development of application code to allow the communication with the upper level, i.e. the various IoT platforms or legacy applications.

How IoT Catalyst tackles the issues

Typically, the heavy load of interfaces between “things” and IoT platforms today is managed at the platform levels, often with ad-hoc interfaces, which are unique to both the “things” and the platform that need to be interfaced.

IoT Catalyst, the solution developed by Fair Wind Digital, on the contrary, moves the interfacing logic nearer to the “thing”, through edge computing, decoupling “things” from upper level applications and creating a multi-cloud layer that substantially allows the communications from the “things” to be collected and dispatched to different platforms, legacy applications, etc. 

The way IoT Catalyst works can be summarized as follows:

1)     The user selects from the repository into IoT Catalyst an/some universal IoT driver template(s) on the basis of the IoT device(s) to be connected. If the driver is still not available in the repository, it can be created with a simple and fast point and click visual user interface.

The driver is independent from any IoT platform, therefore no specific IoT platform knowledge (SDK, API etc.) is required to create a new driver, if it is not available in the repository.

2)     IoT Catalyst dispatches the driver into an IoT gateway (edge computing resource located at the same physical level of the sensor) running the IoT Catalyst Edge Computing Hypervisor.

3)     At the same time, IoT Catalyst automatically executes specific provisioning to the desired IoT Platforms and legacy applications.

4)     At this point the local edge unit is ready and starts to collect data from the IoT sensor and to issue commands to the physical device if requested to do

5)     Data gathered from the sensor are transmitted point-to-point directly to the final destination(s), being it the IoT platform, a legacy application, etc.

6)     Note that, in the bidirectional data transfer above, there is no intermediation done by the IoT Catalyst platform. In other words, the IoT Catalyst platform is only needed to:

•  Create The model and the low-level driver to communicate with the "thing" i.e. the Universal IoT Driver
• Manage the IoT Domain (ecternal endpoints automatic provisioning, mount/unmount of containerized IoT universal drivers, troubleshooting etc.).

Key advantages

One critical advantage coming from the use of IoT Catalyst is the dramatic reduction of the efforts connected to the low-level programming, to interface the IoT devices with the higher-level platform.

IoT Catalyst reduces the workload by making transparent the interfaces with multiple end-points, different IoT platforms, etc. In other words, once the driver has been “injected” as a micro-srvice in the edge gateway, the IoT device can be seamlessly connected to any other platform, without the need to proceed with additional interfacing and low-level programming.

Another significant point to consider relates to the TCO. The offering of IoT platforms is rampant, with lot of new additions, extraordinary set of capabilities, but also very complex and often opaque pricing models.

IoT Catalyst, by decoupling the communication interfaces from the endpoints (legacy applications, IoT platforms etc), enables the creation of IoT use cases that can be tested and sampled without any significant programming efforts on various platforms, to determine the best performing and the most cost-effective one, in relation to the use case and the clients’ needs. In a nutshell, IoT Catalyst allows for a smoother benchmark, not to mention for easier prototyping/testing of use cases and cost-benefit analyses.

Finally, the IoT Catalyst contributes to increased security, thanks to the possibility of defining security policies once, onboarding them in the devices once and forever, without exceptions or different approaches in relation to different platforms.

Existing use-cases

There are different existing uses of the IoT Catalyst platform, spanning from the manufacturing domain where IoT Catalyst interfaces complex industrial machine PLCs with smart manufacturing platforms, to TelCo companies.

For example, IoT Catalyst has been implemented to connect various sensors/meters on TelCo antenna towers of a large mobile operator, delivering the readings to a NOC. Thanks to the easily available integration of different/new sensors, the mobile operator is now able to collect other type of information, not directly related to antennas (e.g. pollution, or other environmental parameters) which can be sold to public or private entities, paving the way to previously unforeseen monetization opportunities.