By using our design services, OEMs can leverage our experience to evaluate their system, customize both the hardware and software of the Z-Aperture™ series to their exact specifications, and add wireless to a new or existing product. Continue reading to learn about some different service architectures that your application may map to and how Alektrona can help wirelessly enable your system.

Service Architectures

Centralized Web Service Architecture

In a centralized web service architecture the gateway acts as a translator between its wireless sensor network and a web service using a M2M protocol. The web service front end provides user facing features like a Web UI and Email. This architecture is useful when information from multiple independent sensor networks must be aggregated to provide the required user functionality.

The AIR FENCE™ Mosquito Magnet® monitoring system, as explained in the News Spotlight, is an example of this architecture. Each Mosquito Magnet® is outfitted with an Alektrona designed ZigBeeT radio and antenna module. This module enables data to be passed over long distances via a mesh network to a system gateway. The system gateway periodically transmits status and fault conditions over the Internet to a centrally hosted web service. By centralizing the data, a web interface for system maintenance providers can display multiple accounts in a single unified view even when the gateways are at different customer locations and behind firewalls.

Localized Service Architecture

In a localized service architecture the gateway directly provides user facing features like a Web UI, Email, Modbus, etc. This architecture is useful when the flexibility of a web service architecture is not warranted or when locality of service matters. For example, the gateway may need to connect directly to a Modbus network or may be operating on an isolated IP network.

Hybrid Service Architecture

In a hybrid architecture the gateway communicates to a web service and directly provides user functionality. The partitioning of functionality is determined by multiple factors. This is the most flexible architecture and in reality most web service architectures are really hybrids that are heavily focused on centralized services but perhaps retain some diagnostic capability directly accessible from the gateway.