2. Introduction

The CloudPlugs Edge One™ Platform is a software application designed to provide full, secure, configuration, management and control of SmartPlug™ based gateways. It is installed as a SmartPlug™ npm package which in turn allows the installation and configuration of application specific modules. A single gateway may be configured with more than one application module if the target environment justifies it and if the modules are supported concurrently.

Features

Edge computing

The Gateway uses the CloudPlugs Fog computing engine to provide edge intelligence and control. Some of the core fog computing features include:

  1. Local Data collection from any field devices and sensors.

  2. Local Device control.

  3. Local Data processing and analytics. The Gateway uses the SmartPlug™ IoT agent at its core and its open application framework allows the programming of applications for processing and transformation of data before it is sent to the cloud.

  4. Local Protocol mediation. Devices with diverse protocols can be connected to a single Edge One™, which can be programmed to enable heterogeneous, multi-protocol device, sensor interactions.

Advanced security

The wireless connection is protected with WEP or WPA encryption and the SmartPlug™ agent providing local intelligence is encrypted with 256-bit AES and 2048-bit RSA encryption to protect the Gateway and data.

Multi-protocol Mediation

Edge One™ is extensible and can be configured with one or more connectivity and application modules. Devices and applications connect to Edge One™ through its local MQTT Message Broker. Device and application data published in the broker is available to other devices and applications for local consumption, processing and deliver to one or more public IoT clouds.

Wired and wireless networking

Edge One™ supports both wireless and wired interfaces to connect to a router to gain access to the Internet. The Web interface allows the configuration of all the platform features and of its connectivity to the Internet.

Edge One™ includes a local WiFi access point service to act as an Internet router for local devices with WiFi connections.

Edge One™ also supports 3G and 4G communications.

Control and Data Connections

Edge One™ uses two connections to a cloud backend. One connection to CloudPlugs IoT which uses a SmartPlug™ agent for device management and control and a second connection for the data path. The data path connection uses MQTT and may be configured to send data to CloudPlugs IoT using the credentials of an enrolled device which is different from the SmartPlug™ device used to configure Edge One™, or to send the data to an external public cloud or MQTT message broker using the credentials of a device configured in the target broker.

IoT Cloud Agnostic

Edge One™ can connect to one or more IoT cloud services simultaneously. Two methods are offered:

  1. Native IoT Cloud Connectors. These MQTT connectors allow Edge One™ to connect to:
  • The CloudPlugs IIoT platform.
  • Microsoft Azure IoT Hub.
  • AWS IoT.
  • Google Iot Core.
  • IBM Watson IoT.
  • Any MQTT Message Broker.
  • KAFKA clusters. Such as those that front-end Hadoop and other Data Lakes.
  1. Flows Engine Connectors. The optional Edge One™ Flows™ module includes a large number of connectors. For a full list of supported IoT clouds and services, please refer to its documentation. To mention a few:
  • AWS IoT, EC2, DynamoDB, Kinesis, Lambda, RDS, S3, SNS, SQS, Thing.
  • Azure IoT Hub.
  • IBM Watson IoT, and several Watson services.
  • GE Predix Microservices.

Benefits

Edge Control and Analytics

The fog computing nature of Edge One™ allows local data collection, control and the development of analytics and data transformation applications. This provides the advantage of being able to create local actions without dependence on the cloud and of being able to operate autonomously even when there is no Internet connection.

Automation Ready

Edge One™ application modules enable the connection of residential, commercial and industrial sensors, energy meters, lighting control, security, flood control and other new generation and legacy devices. You have the flexibility to develop drivers and applications to integrate your own devices and deploy them as docker containers.

Easy to Deploy and Manage

Edge One™ is simple to deploy and install. It’s web interface provides easy access and configuration of all its features.

Flexible

Edge One™ delivers total flexibility in deployment modes, deployment platforms, deployment architectures, and IoT cloud connectivity.

  • Deployment modes. Edge One™ can be configured to operate Online or Offline. Offline operations are supported with the use of the Edge One™ Historian module.
  • Deployment platforms. Edge One™ can be installed on low cost, x86 Linux IoT gateways from Dell, Advantech, ADLink, SECO, and several others, as well as on large multi-core servers when heavy data loads must be processed.
  • Deployment architectures. Edge One™ can be deployed on a single gateway or server, on high availability configurations or on distributed computing configurations that use multiple Edge Ones™ to execute specific tasks.
  • IoT cloud connectivity. Edge One™ is cloud agnostic. It can connect to single IoT cloud service or to multiple IoT cloud services at the same time. For more information refer to the IoT Cloud Agnostic section.

Extensible

Additional modules can be installed and configured in Edge One™ to extend its field device communications, data processing, event processing, analytics and management capabilities. Currently available modules from CloudPlugs include:

  1. WiFi (included by default)
  2. EnOcean
  3. ADS TwinCAT II and III
  4. Modbus RTU and Modbus TCP
  5. OPC Direct Access
  6. OPC Universal Access
  7. Siemens STEP 7
  8. Flows to do visual programming of complex event processign of applications.
  9. Pi-JDBC to retrieve historical data from OSISoft Pi servers.
  10. Datastore to store data in local databases including Cassandra, InfluxDB, MongoDB, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite 3.
  11. Data Visualizer which allows to visualize data in a local database with Grafana.

Additional modules can be added on customer demand.

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Last updated on 6th May 2021