Bring IoT into the Internet

Despite the announced surge of connected objects and fast growth of the Internet of Things, today market got stuck in a start-up phase where each manufacturer has its own solutions and protocols, making the IoT quite a separate Internet. Building a bridge between IoT and the Internet is the initiative of many companies, but the space the bridge must span is a major challenge.

Of course, household things are already part of the Internet, since they leverage local networks (such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or private LoRaWANs) as a relay to the Internet.

Public Network Challenges

However, when it comes to industrial uses, such as Smart Meters, Asset Tracking, Pet Tracking, Urban Lighting Control (among others), it's not that simple anymore since this type of Things needs to rely on large-scale public networks to communicate and send their data to the destination application.

These networks are divided into two categories:

• Unlicensed frequency bands – These are the LPWAN networks, mainly based on LoRaWAN and Sigfox radio technologies;
• Licensed frequency bands (2G to 5G), with cellular LPWAN variations such as LTE-M and NB-IoT.

Among these categories, the available technologies are numerous, creating as many technological silos and a great lack of unicity on this side of the Internet, and a winding path in the feedback of information from the device to the end platform.

IP for IoT by Acklio

Facing this, Acklio took up the challenge of bringing back the Internet of Things into the Internet while taking into account the constraints specific to LPWA networks. By adapting the protocols and allowing convergence between the networks, Acklio finally unifies the whole upload process and creates a tunnel for uplink and downlink data exchange between the source and the destination.

As a result, Acklio has produced a mechanism to bring IP over LPWA networks that has been recognized as a standard by the IETF in April 2020 and has developed a complete software suite to enable this mechanism at each tier – Devices, Edge Gateway, and Cloud – of the data transmission process.