How much do you know about the essential smart gateway for smart homes?

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, smart homes are well known to the public, and there are more and more smart products, ranging from all kinds of home appliances such as smart refrigerators, to sweeping robots, and smart curtains.

When our smart fingerprint unlocked and entered the house, the lights in the house lighted up. With the voice of the intelligent person “Welcome the owner to go home”, the prelude to smart life has opened: “Turn on the TV”, “Turn on the water heater”, “Curtains”, “A Dusk of Zhou Chuanxiong” …

We habitually call for the smart speaker, and feel that it is the “hub” that connects all smart products in the house. In fact, the smart speaker is just a carrier. In the architecture of the whole smart home, the smart gateway is the smart gateway, which connects the home network and the external network to ensure communication between the internal and external networks.

The intelligent gateway is an indispensable part of the smart home. It can implement the controller of the entire smart home system. Its functions include not only the collection, input, and output of information, but also remote and linkage control. Therefore, for consumers, the quality of the smart gateway determines the overall experience of the smart home product purchased.

The intelligent gateway has the ability to access the network. First of all, it has the function of acquiring the attributes and status of each node, and can sense the real-time status of each node. Secondly, it has the functions of remote control, wake-up and diagnosis of nodes. Third, it also has the ability to communicate between different networks. Smart gateway access must have cross-domain communication requirements. Therefore, perfect addressing technology is required to ensure that all node information can be accurately located and queried. Fourth, the intelligent gateway must implement the protocol conversion from the sensor network to the traditional communication network, uniformly encapsulate the standard format data transmitted on the protocol adaptation layer, and unpack the data issued by the wide area access layer into standard format data. The analysis of the command is realized, and then converted into signals and control instructions that can be recognized by the perception layer protocol.

Simply put, the intelligent gateway mainly completes three tasks, first is to collect data from the sensor nodes; second is to perform data protocol conversion; and finally, to quickly send the data after the protocol conversion to the public network. In addition, it should also have corresponding management and control capabilities.

Many times, we are still not clear enough about some professional terms. To summarize the intelligent gateway in one of the most easy-to-understand words: it is like the human brain, human limbs, language, vision, hearing, etc. Organs are instructed by the brain. In the same way, in the smart home system, when each sensor device wants to accept instructions and feedback data, it uses this intelligent gateway as the hub to carry out the command transmission.

Smart home is not just the intelligence of single products. Obviously, the intelligence of single products can no longer meet people’s requirements for smart life. To realize the intelligence of the whole house, the key is to master the smart home system. The smart gateway plays a vital role. Therefore, this requires that smart home manufacturers must produce and develop high-quality smart gateways to ensure that the core smart home controls are truly realized.