Design of an Open source-based Industrial Gateway

Sammanfattning

The rapid growth of the Industrial Internet of Things has increased the demand for low-cost and flexible edge gateways capable of handling real-time communi- cation in industrial environments. This thesis aimed to design and test a custom embedded edge gateway as a cost-effective alternative to the existing commercial solutions. While also meeting basic industrial communication requirements. The system was developed using both hardware and software design. A custom printed circuit board based on a microcontroller was designed, including power supply, communication interfaces, and connectors. The software was written in embedded C, and Ethernet communication was implemented using a User Data- gram Protocol solution. The system was tested by measuring throughput, latency, packet loss, reconnect time, and long-term stability. The results showed that the system could establish a stable Ethernet connection without errors and reached a throughput of 67.1 Mbit/s. During testing, 100 thou- sand packets were sent and all were received correctly with an average round-trip latency of 0.34 ms. The system was also able to reconnect automatically after a network interruption in about 6 seconds and ran continuously for 24 hours with- out any unexpected resets. The study showed that a custom microcontroller-based edge gateway can meet basic industrial communication requirements while keeping costs low and allow- ing flexibility. Even though the performance is limited, the design works well as a proof-of-concept for industrial applications.