UniGate: Modular universal wireless gateway

With the increase number of wireless standards and the number of wireless enabled devices ranging from smart cell phones to notebooks, the new concept of Internet of Things where every tangible “Thing” will have an IP address and wireless connectivity is around the corner. In addition, there is a great interest of Cyber-Physical System interconnecting city´s infrastructure together though wireless connections from bridges to water pipes to smart grid and intelligent transport systems. Not all of these devices will use the same wireless technology for communication and hence it will be very hard for them to exchange control and data messages. Moreover, different wireless technology standards are being used nowadays in many applications such as Bluetooth, WiFi, WiMAX etc. Each technology has a different stack of protocols, medium access control and encoding mechanisms dictating the way it works, operates and technical specifications. Devices with same wireless technology can connect together to exchange control and data messages. With the increase number of wireless technologies available for users, one major difficulty is to interconnect different devices with different wireless technology together. For example, it is impossible for a notebook PC to connect to a Bluetooth device without having a Bluetooth dongle. In this paper, we describe UniGate, a modular universal wireless communication gateway that enables inter-connectivity between devices using different wireless technologies. Moreover, UniGate serves as a virtual computing resource for all connected devices enabling a localized hardware virtualization platform.