Dirk Slama: Mitko, Cisco is making a big push in the direction of fog computing. What developments can we expect in this area?

Mitko Vasilev: We are digitizing our environment to optimize our business processes, our social communities, and our personal lives. The exponential data growth and requirements for real-time digitization will require an additional intelligence layer with complete cloud functionality that will be distributed at the edge of the network, where the Internet ends and the real world begins. A number of major companies have adopted an open IoT architecture incorporating a new intelligence layer at the edge known as “fog”.

The fog layer will lead to a paradigm shift in distributed compute, storage, and analytics. Today, businesses typically deploy separate devices and multiple software controllers for different services. The fog concept combines services, orchestration, manageability, and programmability in a single distributed platform.

Fog-based architectures will change how devices are connected and data is processed, both for Enterprise IoT and Home IoT gateways. Today, data is sent to, processed, and stored in public or private clouds. There the data is analyzed and commands are sent back to the devices to act upon that information, and operators are then notified. Fog computing helps to overcome the costly need to constantly move data to a single data lake, and enables both stream analytics and the transformation of plain data into actionable data close to data points in near real-time analytics. The new methodologies are opening up new business models and also help to meet modern compliance and regulation policies. This is critical for accelerating the mass adoption of the IoT today, and will provide the cost-effective, scalable, and stable infrastructure that is required for future growth.

Dirk Slama: Let’s focus on home gateways for a moment. What’s happening in this space?

Mitko Vasilev: Home IoT gateways are merging and will continue to merge into several common hardware platforms that differ in terms of the software and services used. The underlying operating system is typically based on open-source Linux implementations (predominantly Debian variations, Busy Box, or Yocto) combined with a number of open community-supported tools for orchestration and device management. The current trend in the area of entertainment-enabled gateways will continue with a big emphasis on video streaming to any device, home media services, and integrated home monitoring and management capabilities. Gateways will need to interact with appliances and control systems in the home by using radios and IoT communication stacks (such as Bluetooth low energy or variations of 802.15.4 on 868 MHz/902 MHz ISM bands, like ZigBee and Z-Wave). IoT middleware systems will use gateways to expand environment-sensing capabilities, either with in-built sensors or sensors connected mainly via wireless technology. This will provide the necessary data and platforms for IoT applications to offer a completely personalized home experience. Open-source hardware platforms based on general-purpose CPUs are making these applications more attractive in terms of cost and ease of use, paving the way for the mass adoption of personalized services like control devices for temperature, light, and security systems.

Most gateways will provide connectivity over multiple ISM (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical) radio bands simultaneously (i.e. 169/433/868/902 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and 5 GHz). This is in response both to the dense environment of connected things and to requirements for higher data rates in the gigabit range. The radios integrated in the gateways have already begun to combine BLE, wireless, and new standard-based 802.15.4 radios into a single embedded chip, and this trend is set to continue to an even greater extent. Multiple industry alliances will enable local area connectivity and interoperability between IoT gateways and home appliances, both on a networking and a software communication level. However, interoperability still remains a major challenge to be overcome in the near future.

The application-hosting capabilities of home IoT gateways will open up a new “platform-as-a-service” (PaaS)-style application delivery to connected homes for an improved end-user experience. The combination of gateways, IoT PaaS, and IoT middleware software layers in the cloud will create an open end-to-end vertical architecture.

The cybersecurity mechanisms aligned with IEEE standards (such as 802.1x for device authentication, 802.11i for securing wireless transmissions, and so on) will be auto-enabled on the majority of home IoT gateways as well on the devices they will connect.

SoC circuits combining general-purpose CPUs and DSPs for offloading multimedia processing and accelerating protocol translations will become increasingly common in home IoT gateways.

Dirk Slama: Thanks! And what about the enterprise side of things?

Mitko Vasilev: The hardware architecture of Enterprise IoT gateways will fall into two major CPU architectures: ARM-based CPUs for low-end – and, in some specific cases, mid-range – gateways, and x86-based CPUs for certain mid-level and all high-level product lines. The unification of CPU architectures will facilitate cross-platform deployment of business applications and simplify native services as well as virtualization integration. Most gateways will provide combined hardware and software stacks that will already be highly optimized for end-to-end secure IoT architecture.

Monolithic operating systems will be virtualized to achieve increased optimization of the underlying hardware. In modern Enterprise IoT gateways, different hypervisor technologies (such as KVM, WR, etc.) will be used in order to optimize the prevailing multi-core architectures. Linux-/UNIX-based operating systems with enterprise-level support will be predominant due to their flexibility and business applications ecosystem. Most modern gateway-operating systems will be componentized into dynamic micro-services (i.e. routing, security, content delivery, application container hosting, etc.), which will enable optimized use of the constrained embedded environment. For the enterprise market, the hardware refresh cycle is generally in the range of 20+ years, which will introduce more purpose-built IoT hardware with extended hardware lifecycles. The mainstream availability of new gateways and services is driving the demand for purpose-built gateways for specific verticals that will clone a single flexible architecture. Reference designs will be structured into groups, mainly due to different certification, compliance, and business requirements. Gateway modularity will be significant for flexible IoT deployment and, due to the need for different interfaces – IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.4, Modbus, RS485/232 – and many other open and proprietary connections, will continue to play an important role in the coming decades.