Eclipse IoT has just published a white paper that, although I'm obviously biased, is a nice read for anyone looking at understanding today's IoT architectures, and the role that open source plays by providing some of the key software building blocks needed for implementing IoT solutions.
More specifically, the white paper looks at the core features that need to be provided by each of the three key components (stacks) of an IoT solution:
- the constrained devices – those are typically the billions of devices you hear about in the news: they are cheap, very specialized, and often not capable in terms of communication and networking capabilities,
- the gateways and smarter devices – here we're talking about more powerful equipment that is sitting at the edge of the network, that's to say that bridges the physical world to the Internet,
- the IoT cloud platforms – this is where the devices in the field are managed, and where data is stored and analyzed. IoT cloud platforms must also allow the integration of external applications thanks to open APIs.
You can download the white paper from the Eclipse IoT website.
I will also be giving apresentation at the Virtual IoT meetup on November 2. You should plan on attending to get a chance to learn more about some of the open source projects mentioned in the white paper, and get a more complete overview of what is going on at Eclipse IoT.
