Internet of Things are trending, these things are everywhere. Two big questions being asked are has how can Internet of Things be used in our business, and what will enable Internet of Things. If you are a current customer of CA, or not, there is a new product out that can enabled your enterprise for IoT with Mobile Application Services, and the Mobile API Gateway solution. The requirement starts with having a Enterprise Gateway, and also adding in the benefits from the Mobile API Gateway and Mobile Application Services. In this article, we will consider an IoT use case of having a mobile app(iOS or Android), a smart home, an IoT hub, MQTT as our transmission protocol, and a MQTT Broker.
Some considerations – we have:
- IoT devices – we will utilize a smart home in this scenario
- An IoT Hub
“What is an IoT hub? A hub allows for different smart devices to connect to the hub for data transmission. There are WAN protocols, WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, or even MQTT that can be used for hub communication. The hub allows for central unit to control many devices. The hub then connects to your edge platform, such as the CA Mobile API Gateway, to transmit data”
- Utilizing a light weight transmission protocol – MQTT
- A MQTT broker (on premise, or cloud)
- Mobile application to manage some devices
Starting with the Smart home, we have many devices. Our thermostat, lights, garage, door locks, and cameras. All of our devices connect to our hardware agnostic hub.
“What is a hardware agnostic hub? With connection and protocols such as this use case, hardware agnostic can be defined as no preference to a vendor, or specific brand of smart devices. The hub we discussed previously actually can be setup in multiple ways. We can install open source software to manage (such as Home Assistant, or ) to manage devices on our WiFi network, on a Raspberry Pi/Arduino running a modified version of Linux. These connections can be made via software like Home Assistant to run and manage devices automatically that connect to the network, or with direct connection via Bluetooth, or Zigbee. “
Our hub has picked up the devices joined to the WiFi network, or configured to speak directly to the hub – MAC Address for Bluetooth, or even Zigbee. Our hub sits in the home, and in this case, we will be using the local Wifi connection to transmit data to our Cloud Broker (CloudMQTT) via MQTT. We setup the the hub to publish any state changes from our smart home devices to the broker. Next, we have our Mobile API Gateway, with the MAS (Mobile Application Services) solution kit installed already. With this installed, CA enables MQTT policy assertions. We can setup a policy to subscribe to our MQTT broker, and transmit our IoT data with two way, mutual SSL for additional security.
Now, we also want to enable our mobile app, which we designed a UI that will manage all of our devices on one page. Here we will see the readings from our thermostat, garage door, locks, lights and cameras. The application created can also connect to the Mobile API Gateway (MAG), and access Mobile Application Services to get subscribed topic data in real time to the app. The app will receive all changes in real time, if a door is unlocked our UI will change as our subscription to the MQTT Topic receives data from the IoT hub. From our app we can also post to the topic and send state changes via MQTT – example, turning lights off and on.
Sidenote: Depending on requirement you could directly subscribe to your MQTT broker, but for additional CA security features and policy logic we are communicating with our Mobile API Gateway.
CA MAG, and MAS provide these out of the box features for Internet of Things to be enabled for any enterprise. The variety of products may trigger the idea that there is “a lot of setup”, but CA has made it really easy to upgrade your products to a MAG, and then a MAS solution. All of these products come as solution kits which you can find on https://support.ca.com and are a quick 5 minute guided install in your gateway, along with license.
There are many different use cases for IoT, and ways to utilize smart devices. The use case above is a wholesome solution of most common IoT utilities.
