- An IOTA community member has presented a proof of concept for an IOTA Sensor Tangle Gateway (STG) to connect the industry and its current sensor environment with the Tangle.
- Similar to a cloud gateway, the STG handles the storage in the Tangle, but in a secure, distributed and permissionless manner.
The IOTA community is undoubtedly one of the most active communities when it comes to developing new use cases for the IOTA Tangle technology. In a new project, Michael Kuhlmann has developed a Sensor Tangle Gateway (STG) to connect the currently available sensor environment in industry with the Tangle. The STG ensures that data can be stored on the Tangle in a secure, distributed and permissionless manner without any fees.
As Kuhlmann found out during his research work for the German Blockchain Kompetenznetzwerk (BKN), the IOTA Tangle technology offers “a great potential in the area of decentralized supply chain, the digital twin and in the audit-proof storage of processing data”. Kuhlmann also noted that the revision-proof storage of process data, such as freight or warehouse documents, will become increasingly important in the future industry, when numerous M2M interactions will be completely autonomous.
To make this possible, software or hardware needs to be integrated, which is why Kuhlmann is developing the Sensor tangle Gateway (STG). Kuhlmann compares the STG with cloud gateways used in industry to store sensor data on the Tangle instead of the cloud. As the project progresses, additional features will be added, as Kuhlmann explained:
In addition, the integration of digital identities DID’s, as well as a connection to the Industrial Marketplace is planned in the long term. Another important goal is to use IOTA Streams to give the end user the possibility to assign access rights for data streams, of single sensors or sensor groups, and to share the process information with external parties.
According to Kuhlmann, an important feature at present is the integration of the IO-Link protocol, which with currently about 17 million sensors “provides a solid basis for sensor connection”. In addition, the interaction with the PLC / IO-Link master is in the foreground in order to store the generated data on the Tangle.
The current state of the proof of concept
So far, the project is only a proof of concept to demonstrate the feasibility of the project:
The main goal of this PoC is/was, to show, that an integration of currently available industrial Sensor Environment with the IOTA Tangle is possible and in my opinion, a good possibility to add value to current processes.
The long run goal is to create a website that provides access to the Sensor Tangle Gateway. This will be used to make all settings and allow an easy integration. The biggest problem here are the different standards in the industry, for which a solution must be developed separately:
Common transmission protocols such as PROFINET, PROFIBUS, EtherCAT, Ethernet/IP, Modbus and IO-Link have to be supported in order to enable simple connection to existing networks. The difficulty here will be the integration on the embedded level and the storage of all information on the tangle with maximum performance. Another challenge is to create this product in a way which ensures the industrial standards.
Detailed information about the project can be found in Kuhlmann’s current Medium article. Due to the high costs for the development of the hardware, he is currently looking for partners or donations to further finance the project.