The design of the gateway for the Cloud of Things

The increasing momentum of the Internet of Things (IoT) leaded to the development of a huge number of applications in different domains. Those applications are based on different standards and protocols, making therefore the IoT landscape widely fragmented. In this context, the evolution of Web semantic technologies together with the popularity of Cloud computing represents a solution to enable the horizontal integration of various IoT applications and platforms. This is what the Cloud of Things (CoT) aims to achieve. In this paper, we propose the design of a gateway for the Cloud of Things. The proposed gateway is able to manage semantic-like things and at the same time to act as an end-point for the presentation of data to users. Moreover, thanks to the use of virtualized software—which introduces a negligible impact in terms of performance—the gateway enables a lightweight and dense deployment of services. The paper describes the above technologies and how to combine them in order to design the gateway. Furthermore, we provide information about use cases, hardware, performance evaluation, and future hints to enhance the gateway.