It is quickly realized that building a protocol gateway by implementing translation pairs between protocols directly is very inefficient and difficult to maintain. A more fruitful path is to use a common abstraction model suitable for IoT and the translation of operations between different protocols. If such an abstraction model is used, translation pairs only need to translate between a given protocol and the abstraction model. This method is more efficient when it comes to implementation and quality assurance than direct translation if more than three different protocols are supported. While translating between two different protocols, you simply need to translate to the common abstraction model first and then use the second translation pair to translate from the abstraction model to the corresponding protocol.

Apart from shortening the development time drastically, a good abstraction model also helps in other ways. It can be used by internal services and administrative...