SemiWiki: An IIot Gateway to the Cloud

by Benard Murphy

A piece of learning we all seem to have gained from practical considerations of IoT infrastructure is that no, it doesn’t make sense to ship all the data from an IoT edge device to the cloud and let the cloud do all the computational heavy lifting. On the face of it that idea seemed good – all those edge devices could be super cheap (silicon dust) and super-low power.

But the downsides can be severe. The latency in a round-trip to the cloud may not be acceptable if that edge device needs real-time response to adjust machine behavior. Power at the edge can actually be worse if you are burning it to ship large quantities of data uphill. Security is a problem, as much in industrial IoT (IIoT) devices as in personal devices thanks to a potentially significant attack surface, from the edge to the cloud. Even reliability is at the mercy of the link and the cloud, perhaps acceptable for a consumer device, but not necessarily for industrial applications.

For the rest of this article, please visit SemiWiki.