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Edge computing: bringing the cloud down to Earth

In Industrial IoT (IIoT) environments, smart edge device ranging from load breakers and meter concentrators to sensors, CCTV cameras, traffic monitoring and control units, remote PLC controllers and other automation-enabled devices, are connected to the operational network and control centre via an IIoT gateway.

The most talked-about benefit of IIoT is the shift of focus to increased efficiency and lower costs using smart edge devices and big data analytics. Still, massive data transmissions to and from many IIoT devices in remote sites, over diverse network connections and in a timely manner, are not trivial challenges to overcome. Also challenging is the need for actionable information (in other words, real-time analytics) to make sense of all the data collected.

The powerful edge computing/IoT combination is one very compelling way to go about it. The addition of edge computing capabilities to the Industrial IoT gateway hardware is currently viewed with great interest as it allows the Industrial IoT gateway to perform local storing and processing of data, meaning higher reliability, lower latency and tighter security.

So, if you’re planning your new Industrial IoT project, after choosing your smart edge devices, IoT applications, management and dashboards, you will probably want to consider the parameters by which to select the Industrial IoT gateway solution that is right for your project size, deployment strategy and geographic spread. To save you some valuable research time, we’ve listed some aspects below that have been found to be relevant in almost all the projects that we’ve been involved in. We believe they’ll be useful for you as well.

There are five widely acceptable criteria for choosing the right Industrial IoT gateway:

• ​Open standards.

• Flexible architectures.

• Cloud technology.

• Edge computing.

• Affordable and more flexible hardware​.

The combination of these criteria is meant to enable increased efficiency and lower costs, and involves new technologies such as LPWAN for IoT LoRa and LoRaWAN gateways, Industrial IoT edge computing, MQTT for IoT, and IoT PLC gateways for IoT scada.

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