However, this connectivity is still very limited. Because without the participation of machines, our application of the internet is incomplete. Only when more than 7 billion people and around 60 billion machines are connected can the value of the internet be maximized, and human society be fully liberated from physical and mental labor.
Currently, data acquisition technology is mainly constrained by two factors: firstly, some machines lack data interfaces, and secondly, there are numerous heterogeneous communication standards. At the same time, considering the inertia of industrial development, a complete replacement of old technologies with new ones cannot solve these two problems. Therefore, industrial society needs to add data interfaces (including sensors) to machines that lack them and adopt fully compatible data acquisition technologies across heterogeneous communication standards. Universal gateways are products that provide this fully compatible technology.
In the industrial internet technology system, the universal gateway is part of edge computing. This is a significant difference from the traditional internet. Each communication protocol corresponds to a communication driver for the universal gateway.
The new technology involves offloading communication data packets to edge computing processing within a general-purpose gateway, breaking down the data into more relevant segments. This significantly reduces the development costs of communication processing for general-purpose gateways and improves their data collection flexibility. Another application of edge computing is, of course, to alleviate the necessary processing on cloud platforms and reduce their computational burden.
Meanwhile, computing comprised of multiple edge computing units is also a crucial component of the Industrial Internet. The addition of computing can significantly enhance the distributed computing capabilities of the Industrial Internet. Considering the uncertainty of internet communication, it is also necessary to add a disconnection and reconnection function to the general gateway to maintain data integrity. Furthermore, the real-time performance and synchronization of data need to be considered. These characteristics can generally be determined by adjusting the communication request cycle and the timestamps used to mark data.
Clearly, general-purpose gateways are crucial data collection devices, forming a massive communication node system within the entire Industrial Internet and significantly impacting its operation. Therefore, we need effective network tools to manage this communication node system, monitoring its operational status, data updates, collection cycles, and other aspects, while also dynamically adjusting corresponding software maintenance, node parameters, and interface configurations.
