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Device Connectivity & Management

Device Connectivity & Management helps you quickly and securely connect physical devices to EnOS Cloud and start to transfer data, manage device lifecycle, and map the physical asset structure to the digital world.

Connectivity Service

Bi-directional Connectivity to Devices

Device Connectivity & Management enables you to quickly establish bi-directional communication between the device and the cloud:

• Data ingestion from device to cloud

• Remote control from cloud to device

For the message flow and an overview of the technical components, see Device Connectivity Overview.

Communication Protocols

Device Connectivity & Management supports mainstream protocols for messages to be transmitted between devices and EnOS itself.

• MQTT protocol: to meet the real-time requirements for devices that can sustain long connections. For more information, see MQTT-based Connection.

• CoAP protocol: to meet the requirements of resource-constrained internet devices, such as smart meter devices. For more information, see CoAP-based Connection.

• HTTP protocol: for devices that are unable to sustain long connections due to the network or restricted bandwidth, and devices that need to constantly upload file-type data, such as a camera that sends video files. For more information, see HTTP-based Connection.

Supported Data Format

Devices can use not only EnOS standard data format but also the device’s own custom data format such as Hex to communicate with EnOS as EnOS provides data conversion capabilities which can convert custom device data format into a standard data format that EnOS can understand.

For more information, see Data Format.

Device SDKs

Simple device-end development is needed to enable the device to communicate with EnOS by following EnOS standard device protocol. EnOS provides SDKs for C, Java, Node.js, and Python programming languages for the device-end development.

For more information, see Using EnOS Device SDKs.

Device Simulators

In situations where there are no actual devices available, Device Connectivity & Management provides users the capability to simulate data for testing and debugging purposes.

For more information, see Device Simulator or Online Debugging.

Device Connectivity Solutions

Device Connectivity & Management supports various connection schemes and provides solutions to meet the requirements of various scenarios for the heterogeneous network enterprise devices.

For more information, see Device Connectivity.

Connectivity to Third-party Systems

In addition to direct device connectivity, Device Connectivity & Management also allows you to ingest device data through integrating messages forwarded from third-party cloud or systems.

For more information, see Message Integration.

Device and Cloud Security

Device Connectivity & Management ensures device and cloud security in the areas below.

• Device Connection Security

  • The device needs to be connected to EnOS through the device triple. Each time it connects, the device needs to use the SHA256 to calculate the connection password based on the secret keys.

  • For devices accessed through the MQTT protocol, supports the secure, two-way authentication based on TLS.

  • For devices accessed through the CoAP protocol, supports DTLS-based security solutions.

  • For devices accessed through the HTTP protocol, supports HTTPS as the access scheme.

• Device Security Management and Auditing

  • For connection through proxy gateway devices, Device Connectivity & Management provides topology management. The device can only connect to EnOS through the pre-configured gateway.

  • Provides a mechanism to detect duplicate connections to a device, to ensure that only one connection to EnOS is established for the same device at any given moment.

  • Ensures that dynamically activated devices cannot be repeatedly activated.

  • Provides audit logs for device behaviour.

For more information, see Device Security Schemes.

High Availability

Device Connectivity & Management ensures high availability in the following areas.

• Architecture

  • Containerization, relying on Kubernetes to manage Pod replica sets.

  • PRC uses the Apache Dubbo framework to solve the problems of service discovery and service registration

  • Middleware rely on clustered services, such as ES cluster, Mongo active and standby, etc.

• Service

  • A flow limiting strategy is adopted for MQTT broker. Excessive load will trigger TCP traffic control.

  • For scenarios such as heavy reconnecting/kicking of connections within short periods of time, the overload protection mechanism avoids unnecessary resource consumption.

• Operation and Maintenance

  • Regular archiving of database.

  • Basic business monitoring, including various types of service calls, time consumption, and other monitoring indicators.

Asset Management Service

EnOS supports rich asset management capabilities, which include but is not limited to:

• Device modelling

• Device lifecycle management, including

  • Device registration

  • Device activation

  • Device enabling/disabling

  • Device deletion

• Device configuration

• Asset tree management

• Device and message statistics dashboard

• Firmware upgrade over-the-air (OTA)

• Real-time monitoring

• Device decommissioning

For more information, see Device Lifecycle Management.

General Service

A general module that supports device access, asset management, alert engine, and is not visible to users, includes the following functions.

• File service: Supports devices to upload file type data.

• Timed service: Supports some tasks that need to be scheduled, such as delayed triggering of alerts.

• Quota service: Limits device access and API calls and configures different traffic for different OUs.

• Certificate service: Issues certificates and verify certificates for device security access.

• Front-end console support: Supports configuring, viewing, and other operations via EnOS Application Portal > Developer Console.

• Scenario-based automatic testing tool: Used for service deployment and verification, detects whether the environment is deployed correctly and whether the operation status is normal.

Target Users

Device Connectivity & Management primarily serves the following roles:

IoT Engineer

The IoT Engineer, who performs the on-site installation (including installing the edge gateway devices and connecting the cables between edge gateways and devices) sets up device connections and debugs the communication between the devices and the cloud.

Edge Developer

The Edge Developer is responsible for developing the MQTT client applications in accordance with EnOS standard device protocols. The goal of such applications is to collect the telemetry data of the edge and transfer the data through supported protocols to EnOS Cloud in the supported formats.

Asset Manager

The Assets Manager creates and manages the asset hierarchy (asset tree) based on the business case scenarios.

Application Developer

The Application Developer develops applications to acquire device telemetry and configuration information via EnOS APIs and SDKs to meet the requirements of specific business case scenarios.

Quick Start

Learn how to quickly connect a typical smart IoT device or an edge device to EnOS Cloud and start sending telemetries between the device and the cloud:

• Quick Start: Connecting a Smart Device

• Quick Start: Connecting a Non-Smart Device

Related Products and Services

Device Provisioning Service

The Device Provisioning Service helps to simplify the onboarding process for devices by pre-configuring and registering the information required to onboard them. Accessible via EnOS Application Portal > Developer Console, it is a helper, cloud-based service that enables zero-touch IoT device provisioning to EnOS, where millions of devices can be onboarded easily and efficiently via plug-and-play or QR code scanning, enabling the scalable and secure provisioning of devices.

For more information, see Device Provisioning Service.

Alert Engine

Alert Engine allows you to flexibly define alert rules ranging from simple rules for device telemetry to complex rules for stream processing results for your devices. EnOS supports asset-tree-based alert rules such as the impacted scope of devices, alert masking policies, etc.

It also enables you to manage millions of alerts on your assets and take immediate actions based on the alerts.

For more information, see Alert Engine.

EnOS Edge

EnO Edge is an intelligent software-defined IoT gateway and edge computing platform that adapts to heterogeneous devices and systems in the physical world and enables cost-effective IoT connectivity, edge computing, local control and optimization solutions.

For more information, see EnOS Edge.