Connecting an application to your IoT network

For both SaaS and Self-hosted deployment modes, ThingPark Enterprise provides users with two types of connections towards their external IoT applications:

• ThingPark X IoT Flow connections, towards the leading IoT cloud platforms (Amazon AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure, IBM Watson, ThingWorx, Yandex, Cumulocity and many others...). ThingPark X IoT Flow also supports generic MQTT and HTTP connections.

  ThingPark X IoT Flow consists of asynchronous data flows with built-in message queuing services designed to meet high availability, scalability and resiliency requirements for industrial deployments. IoT Flow provides a wide range of professionally supported IoT connectors towards the leading IoT platforms, the transport protocol used to convey the messages is specific to each connector type.

  IoT Flow also provides a rich built-in catalog of payload drivers, in addition to supporting custom payload drivers. To learn more about ThingPark X IoT Flow payload decoding capabilities, click Sending/receiving process for payloads using an IoT Flow engine.

• Basic HTTPS connections, through ThingPark LRC(NS) - AS Tunnel Interface.

  This type provides a direct bidirectional connection between the Network Server (NS) and third-party Application Servers (AS) using HTTPS protocol, also known as NS-AS Tunnel Interface. For security purposes, downlink messages are accepted only if an encrypted token is included in the POST. Device payloads are exchanged in encoded format without the support of payload drivers. This connection type does not support message queuing services: when the AS is temporarily unavailable or overloaded, the uplink messages will be lost. The AS may also be temporarily throttled by software fuses if it cannot keep up with uplinks.

  To learn more about basic HTTPS connections, see ThingPark Enterprise LRC-AS Tunnel Interface Developer Guide for LoRaWAN®.

A third type of connection is optionally supported in Self-hosted ThingPark Enterprise:

• Node-RED connection, via Node-RED application.

  Node-RED is a browser-based flow editor that is used for building Internet of Things applications. It provides you with code blocks known as nodes, each node describing a task. When linked together, the nodes make up a flow.

  The Node-RED editor is accessible from the ThingPark Enterprise user interface with Single Sign-On (SSO).

Using Node-RED connections is optional on self-hosted ThingPark Enterprise, it may be activated via Cockpit, typically during installation procedure but it can be changed post-installation. For activation/deactivation through Cockpit, contact your System Integrator.

Note Node-RED type of connection is not supported on ThingPark Enterprise SaaS. As there are no such computation constraints on ThingPark SaaS platforms, hence ThingPark X IoT Flow is systematically available in SaaS mode.

Application type	TPE SaaS	Self-hosted TPE
TPX IoT Flow connection	Default	Default
Node-RED connection	n/a	Optional

Connection provisioning constraints

The following limitations are applicable to the quantity and type of supported connections in ThingPark Enterprise:

Application type	TPE SaaS	Self-hosted TPE
Number of generic HTTPS connections	Not enforced (unlimited)	Not enforced (unlimited)
Number of ThingPark X IoT Flow connections	Up to 20 (10 by default)	Up to 20 (5 by default, configurable according to the platform sizing profile)
Node-RED connections	Not applicable	1

You can provision as many ThingPark X connections as needed, whatever their connector types, as long as the total number of TPX connections does not exceed the limit defined in the preceding table.

The following table guides you through the steps to add new connections towards your IoT applications.

Connection type	To learn more, see
ThingPark X IoT Flow	Adding a ThingPark X IoT Flow connection
Basic HTTPS	Adding a basic HTTPS connection
Node-RED	Adding a Node-RED connection