EZgate - A flexible Gateway for the Internet of Things

Abstract

Two years ago a survey of the wireless world research forum predicted
that in the year 2017 there will be seven trillion wireless devices for seven billion
humans which is equivalent to 1000 devices per human being on the average. The
future will show if this incredible number will be reached but for sure we will see
an increasing number of wireless devices forming the Internet of the future. The
new evolving “Internet of Things” is one of the challenging research topics today.
With many wireless resource constraints devices, smart gateways integrating these
small battery-powered devices into the future Internet will play a major role for the
success of the Internet of Things. These gateways will work as a communication
endpoint or proxy enabling transparent services including mechanisms for seman-
tic service discovery, Quality of Service (QoS), and performance enhancing prox-
ies (PEPs). In this work we will introduce a fully operable TCP/IP-Stack EZgate
written in Java that allows designing and implementing such gateways for wireless
networks in a flexible and fast approach and compare it with related work. We will
demonstrate how the protocols in this stack can be assembled in a flexible manner,
creating various types of gateways and can be easily extended to implement cross
layer techniques. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the implementation for
delay and throughput performance to show that EZgate is suitable for use in a pro-
ductive environment.