Device Connectivity & Management Service¶
The Device Connectivity & Management Service 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¶
The Device Connectivity & Management Service 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¶
The Device Connectivity & Management Service supports mainstream protocols for messages to be transmitted between devices and the IoT Hub 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 the EnOS standard data format but also the device’s own custom data format such as Hex to communicate with IoT Hub as IoT Hub provides data conversion capabilities which can convert custom device data format into a standard data format that IoT Hub 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 the 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, IoT Hub provides users the capability to simulate data for testing and debugging purposes.
For more information, see Device Simulator or Online Debugging.
Device Connectivity Solutions¶
The Device Connectivity & Management Service 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, the Device Connectivity & Management Service 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¶
IoT Hub 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, IoT Hub 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¶
IoT Hub 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 service, 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 the EnOS Management 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¶
The Device Connectivity & Management Service 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 the 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 the 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: