ECIoT: Case for an Edge-Centric IoT Gateway

Udhaya Kumar Dayalan, Rostand A. K. Fezeu, Nitin Varyani, Timothy J. Salo, Zhi-Li Zhang

Abstract: Numerous cloud service providers (CSPs) have developed IoT gateways and devices that connect IoT devices solely to their respective clouds. We term these gateways cloud-centric. In this paper, we propose an alternative, edge-centric approach to developing IoT gateways, Edge-Centric IoT Gateways, or ECIoT. ECIoT gateways will: enable sites to direct IoT sensor data to the CSP of their choice for processing and storage and permit IoT sensor data to be easily and efficiently forwarded to multiple CSPs simultaneously, which can simplify these functions in multi-vendor IoT systems. Evaluation of a preliminary, proof-of-concept prototype suggests that the ECIoT gateway can achieve these multi-vendor objectives with minimal overhead.