Edge Connectivity in ThingWorx™ Extending the ThingWorx Platform Out To the Physical World

WHITEPAPER

A MODERN APPROACH TO INTEGRATING REMOTE RESOURCES

INTO YOUR CONNECTED APPLICATIONS

One of the hallmarks of ThingWorx is its ability to integrate the physical world into business processes. These processes increasingly require information from and interaction with people, enterprise software systems, and remote devices. Unfortunately, not all physical systems are created equally and there is no universal answer to integrating those remote systems into your business processes. Fortunately, ThingWorx was designed with a deep understanding of device connectivity and the myriad of existing connectivity models as well as with a modern AlwaysOn™ model that addresses many of the problems with existing solutions. This whitepaper discusses the varied mechanisms available for seamlessly integrating both legacy and newly designed edge devices into the ThingWorx platform.

Edge Connectivity in ThingWorx

www.thingworx.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1  AN IMPERFECT WORLD ......................................................................................................................... 3 

2  A TAXONOMY OF EDGE CONNECTIVITY ................................................................................................. 3 

Direct Connect ......................................................................................................................................................... 3 AlwaysOn™ .............................................................................................................................................................. 4 AlwaysOn™ Embedded ............................................................................................................................................ 5 AlwaysOn™ Tethered ............................................................................................................................................... 5 AlwaysOn™ Network Gateway ................................................................................................................................ 6 Device Cloud/Internet Gateway............................................................................................................................... 6 

3  SUMMARY ............................................................................................................................................ 7 

Edge Connectivity in ThingWorx

www.thingworx.com

1 AN IMPERFECT WORLD In a perfect world, where bandwidth is free and unlimited, batteries last forever, all devices use the most modern of communications technology, and everyone on the Internet is friendly and law abiding, connectivity with edge devices is simple. Bi-directional REST based interactions enable interactive communications between an edge device and the ThingWorx server and visa-versa. Unfortunately, unless everything is line-powered and deployed within your own private network, the world is far from perfect. On wired networks there are firewalls and other necessary IT security infrastructure. On wireless networks there are issues with the cost of bandwidth, unpredictable IP addresses, and battery life. And in all cases there is the need for encryption, authentication, authorization and auditing to keep information away from prying eyes.

Over the years many technologies have been developed and deployed to address the myriad of different scenarios and requirements for remote device connectivity and it is simply not realistic to expect companies to start from scratch when developing new connected applications. Therefore, the ThingWorx platform must not only support legacy systems, it must embrace them, attempting to bring them into as near a perfect world as possible. That is the goal of the ThingWorx approach to edge connectivity: abstract away any imperfections of the existing connectivity model so that applications built with ThingWorx can work with as secure and perfect a world as possible.

2 A TAXONOMY OF EDGE CONNECTIVITY Edge connectivity takes multiple forms and people have been classifying these forms in many ways. The most often used breakdown is wired vs. wireless. However, with the rapid advances in wireless capacity and bandwidth, the technical distinction between these is less important. What is important is the ongoing operating costs that wireless brings with it. Another cost that is often overlooked is energy costs to operate a specific transport. In battery powered systems this can be a very significant expense in terms of downtime and battery replacement costs. ThingWorx takes these factors into account as it looks at the connectivity taxonomy in a slightly different fashion.

The ThingWorx platform has been architected to easily support the following modes of interaction with edge devices and sensors.

Direct Connect There are certain deployments where the ThingWorx server, either standalone or in a federated model, and an edge device can interact directly through mutual HTTPS REST based interfaces. Consider a manufacturing facility where all the equipment is on the same network. Each piece of intelligent equipment may have its own controller and Human Machine Interface (HMI). The system used for the HMI typically has enough resources to also expose its data to the network via REST based web services or some existing interface such as OPC or ODBC. In

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