What Is a Residential Gateway?

A residential gateway is a piece of hardware that connects a home or small office network to the Internet. Residential gateways provide conversion capabilities and enable users to share DSL or cable modem Internet connections with all computers on the internal network. The residential gateway is located between the DSL or cable modem and the internal network. DSL or cable modems can also be integrated into residential gateways.

The home gateway is made up of a microcontroller and

Home gateways are mainly used for external network access,

There are a variety of devices that can be called "residential gateways": cable modems, DSL modem wireless routers, network switches, Internet Protocol calling technology (VoIP) and analog telephone adapters, wireless access points, and wired routers. The device may also be a combination of the above devices. A modem (eg, DSL modem, cable modem) does not provide the functionality of a router. It only allows ATM or Ethernet or PPP traffic to be transmitted over telephone lines, cables, fiber optics or radio frequencies. At the receiving end is another modem that retransforms the transmission format back into digital data packets. This allows the network to be connected by telephone, cable, optical or radio. The modem also provides a handshake protocol to enable devices at each end of the connection to recognize each other. However, modems rarely provide other network functions. Plugging a USB modem into a computer allows a single computer to connect to the WAN. If configured correctly, the computer can also act as a router for your home LAN.

A built-in modem can be installed on a single computer (for example via a PCI card), which also allows a single computer to be connected to the WAN. Similarly, the computer can be configured to act as a router for a home LAN.

Wireless access points can work in a modem-like manner. If a wireless router or access point is already connected to the WAN, it can enable connections in the home local area network (LAN) to pass directly through the point wide area network (WAN).

The home gateway is a system combining software and hardware. It not only needs to be connected with various home terminals to achieve the interconnection of heterogeneous networks in the home, but also needs to provide a convenient way of human-computer interaction to facilitate family members' access to the gateway system and Configuration. Therefore, the main principles that the IoT home gateway needs to refer to when designing are:

Practicality

The practicality of a system is its most basic value manifestation. To evaluate the quality of a product, the first thing to look at is whether the product can solve the problems encountered by users and whether it can create an experience that exceeds user expectations. In the early stages of the development of the home Internet of Things and smart home, various communication protocols were proposed and applied, and they were not compatible with each other. Each home device will be equipped with an independent APP. With the increase of home devices, Users often need to install multiple APPs on their phones, which makes the management of home devices very confusing. The essential function of the IoT home gateway to be designed in this article is to solve the above-mentioned problems encountered by users. Through hardware and software design, it provides users with an interface to access various heterogeneous networks. The interface realizes the access and control of each home terminal.

stability

As the core device of the home network, the gateway must be able to maintain stable work for a long time, so the gateway needs to have the ability to operate reliably. When the device operation load is too high, the overall service experience of the device will decrease, and the service performance of important tasks can be guaranteed by reducing the response to low-priority tasks. The redundant design on the hardware can ensure the reliability of the communication to a certain extent and ensure the data transmission to the home gateway and the back-end server.

Scalability

With the advent of the family Internet of Things era, the types and quantity of home intelligent terminals and third-party application software are rapidly increasing. In order to be as compatible as possible with new terminal equipment and third-party application software, the software and hardware interface units of the IoT home gateway Both need to have good scalability.

Ease of use

For ordinary users, various network terms and network settings are very complicated and confusing, and simple interactive interfaces and fool-like setting guidance are often what users expect. In the IoT home gateway system designed in this article, the hardware access operation is simplified as much as possible, and the friendly human-machine interface is used to interact with the user, so that the user has a good experience.

Network access and protocol conversion

From the basic concept of the home gateway, it can be known that the home gateway is the interface unit of the entire home gateway, which enables various intelligent terminals in the home to access the Internet and implement mutual communication between the intelligent terminals. Network access and protocol conversion are the first functions to be considered when designing a home gateway. Only after completing the construction of the home heterogeneous network path can data be transmitted between the networks, thereby realizing home intelligent management.

User Management

User management is an important part of the gateway system. For the consideration of home network security, stability, and data sensitivity, different users have different permissions, and bind user information with smart terminals accessed by users. First, the home gateway regards the first user who logs in to the interactive interface and registers as the highest authority user. Other users need to be added by this user before they can access the home network. Second, for data measurement smart terminals (such as oximeters, sphygmomanometers) Use), the user needs to select the user before each use, and tell the home gateway which user is using the device. After receiving the measured data, the home gateway can associate the user with the data for the convenience of the user to check in the future. The control of general household appliances does not need to select users (such as the control of smart lamps, TVs, and air conditioners), and household users can directly access them. Finally, for children in the family, parents can restrict their permissions and prohibit them. Use relatively hazardous appliances (such as induction cookers, microwave ovens).

Equipment management

Device management is similar to user management methods. Each device must obtain the consent of the home user when it is first connected to the home network, and the device name and device type (such as health data measurement, home environment data measurement, multimedia playback, etc.) must be marked. ), The home gateway binds this information with the ID of the acquired device to facilitate the classification management of the device later.

Data management

The user information, device information, and measurement data and log files generated by the user when using the smart terminal need to be processed and stored through effective data, which can be displayed visually when the user views it, which is convenient for the user to view. In addition, only data associated with users and device types can be valuable

Application Service Management

The home network must not only improve the management of home intelligent terminal equipment, but also improve the intelligence of users' lives (such as one-click ordering provided by Amazon Echo, online ordering of pizzas, Uber taxis and other services) ^[2] .