Bridging the LAN and the WAN: Our WAN Bridge IoT Hack

In 2010, there were over 12.5 billion connected devices spread across the globe. These devices aren’t just phones and tablets, but really are anything with an IP address. Yet, only 1% of the world’s connected devices are actually connected to the WAN. We need to be able to connect your devices securely and reliably not just locally on the LAN, but anywhere on Earth over the Wide Area Network.

At the SF Wearable and IoT Hackendo Hackathon last week, our PubNub team aimed to do just that. Devices need to work on closed networks and private networks (the LAN) but also outside the local area network too (the WAN). Users need to be able to turn on lights or open their garage door or receive telemetric and photonic sensory data no matter where they are, regardless of network configuration.

As a result, we removed those limitations and expand a secure and reliable way for devices to connect on the wide area network independent of network configuration and 100% closed firewalls. We built a WAN bridge

In the video below, Stephen and Geremy talk IoT and demo our hack:

We used the AllJoyn IoT framework and bridged it with PubNub to allow smart devices to communicate with each other, no matter how they are connected on closed networks. With PubNub, we extended connectivity not just through the LAN bridge, but also the ability to connect to over 50 different platforms simultaneously in realtime, removing ops configuration barriers altogether.

We succeeded in bridging connected homes, cars, buildings and warehouses into the WAN, even through closed private networks without changing network configuration. We were able to fully automate several smart home devices with our product and additionally created a dashboard to monitor these systems. The dashboard receives and shows electricity consumption stats, and also gives you the ability to turn on and off devices with the press of a button.

WAN Bridge: Where does PubNub come in?

PubNub powers the Internet of Things with our globally distributed data stream network, and allows you to connect devices securely and reliably. Users and businesses can communicate with their other fleet, sensors and devices in realtime, over 4G, WAN and private, secure networks. Security is paramount for an IoT solution provider and it is no small task to secure 40 billion devices. PubNub provides beyond industry expected security requirements with socket based PubNub Access Management with ACL (Access Control Levels), AES256 Ciphers, SSL 2048bit TLS, Public Private Key Cryptography, SHA256 Origin Signing and more. And with fourteen data centers spread across the global, messages are replicated to ensure delivery.

Consider PubNub your CDN for IoT; your global IoT data stream network tailored for all networks with devices running embedded platforms including TinyOS, Contiki, PIC32, Linux, Arduino, RTOS, FreeRTOS, RaspberryPi, Android Embedded, mBed (ARM), Electric Imp and many more.

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