ioConnect Overview

Why ioConnect is needed?

Many traditional Web2-based IoT businesses are looking for new opportunities in the Web3 space and the ioConnect SDK is dedicatedly built to address the pain points during this transition.

Heterogeneity of Smart Devices

Smart devices used in today's IoT businesses vary in terms of chip architectures (e.g., Arm, MIPS, RISC-V, etc.), operating systems (e.g., RTOS, Linux, Android, etc.), peripherals, etc. An IoT development team often faces two major technical hurdles when they try to join the Web3 evolution: 1) Lack of Web3 development kits that support their hardware platforms; and 2) Adoption of different Web3 development kits for different hardware platforms. The first technical challenge prevents an IoT business from being transformed into a Web3 one, whereas the second technical challenge leads to increased learning time and development costs as well as decreased code resuability for developers. The ioConnect SDK tackles these challenges by employing an innovative SDK architecture composed of a core framework (CF) and a platform adaptation layer (PAL). While the core framework consists of stable and platform-independent functionalities such as cryptographic algorithms, communication interfaces, data encoding/decoding, etc., the platform adaptation layer handles platform-specific functionalities and accommodates requirements of different embedded systems and communities. This design methodology enables the ioConnect SDK to be easily integrated into various smart devices, thereby greatly reducing the development complexity and learning curve.

Complexity of Web3 Transition

Traditional Web2-based IoT projects are highly centralized and transforming those projects into Web3 ones usually involve significant changes in system architecture and device firmware. Such a lengthy and tedious transformation process has posed a major challenge for Web2-based IoT businesses.The ioConnect SDK is able to simplify the changes of existing device firmware by introducing the concept of a standard layer. The standard layer refers to well-known design frameworks, such as embedded operating systems (e.g., FreeRTOS, Zephyr, etc.), POSIX standards, and community-driven code frameworks (e.g., Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ESP32, etc.). The usage of a standard layer can effectively minimize code coupling between the ioConnect SDK and original Web2-based IoT project. When the framework provided by the standard layer is used, an IoT developer can easily integrate the ioConnect SDK into existing project codebase with only minor code modifications.

To address the pain points that are faced by traditional Web2-based IoT businesses during their Web3 journey, the DeviceConncet SDK is built with a number of salient features.