The Difference Between Industrial Modems and Industrial Gateways

In the development wave of industry 4.0, industry gradually develops to intelligence. As the name implies, industrial Internet of things is the connection of industrial equipment. The connection here refers to the Internet connection. To connect, it must have the intelligent terminal of connected equipment. After connecting, it needs the platform for data interaction.

The industrial Internet of Things can be briefly divided into four technical processes: terminal, connection, interaction and application. Industrial equipment with the development of electronic control technology, most of the equipment has a control unit, such as PLC, controller, control board and so on, then you can put the electronic control unit as a terminal networking, and some other simple industrial equipment does not have a control unit, then it is necessary to install the network terminal, common data collectors, network sensors and so on. Most industrial equipment on the electronic control unit does not support Internet communication, then it is necessary to install a gateway to connect to the Internet. The Industrial Internet of Things include cellular modems, industrial edge computing gateways, industrial routers, and serial port servers. This article focuses on the cellular modems and gateways, and the differences between them.

What are the Cellular modems and gateways?

Cellular modems are wireless terminal devices that convert serial port data to IP data or convert IP data to serial port data for transmission over wireless communication networks. The network is fast and flexible, with short construction period and low cost; Wide network coverage; Good security and confidentiality performance; Link support always-on, charging by traffic, low user cost.

The industrial gateway is equipped with the functions of collecting data of field equipment through serial port, network port or io interface, and realizing data collection, protocol analysis, data standardization and uploading to the cloud platform through edge computing function. The adoption of the Internet of Things standard protocol MQTT and edge computing technology, is very high concurrency platform access, at the same time has a variety of device protocol drivers, for the customer's upper software to provide stable data channel and standardized field data.

Cellular modems differ from industrial gateways

The difference between the Cellular modems and industrial gateways is simply that the industrial gateways are more powerful wireless communications devices than the Cellular modems. Cellular modems generally support simple, general encryption of data to and from the Dems. Industrial gateways, on the other hand, have more interfaces, rich protocol libraries, and more scalable device access capabilities. Data is cached on disks, and transferred to servers after the network is restored. Data is always consistent. At the same time support remote management, remote upgrade and so on.

Cellular modems are only able to conduct transparent data transmission, while industrial gateways are able to process the data they collect, such as loading them in agreed message formats. How do you choose between the cellular modems and industrial gateways? I suggest you decide based on your project requirements

Advantages of Cellular modems and industrial gateways

Cellular modems Advantages:

1. Fast and flexible networking, short construction cycle, and low cost;

2. Wide network coverage;

3. Good safety performance;

4. The link supports normally open, charging according to traffic, low user cost;

Core functions of Cellular modems:

1. Internal integration of TCP/IP protocol stack.

2. Provide serial data bidirectional conversion function.

3. Support automatic heartbeat, always online.

4. Support parameter configuration and permanent storage.

5. Support user serial port parameter setting.

Cellular modems and industrial gateway applications

Both Cellular modems and gateways are used for inter-device communication, but they are used in different scenarios and in different ways.

Cellular modems are mainly used in remote monitoring and data acquisition scenarios, where they transfer data collected by sensors, instruments, and other devices to monitoring centers or cloud platforms over wireless or wired networks. Cellular modems have data acquisition, transmission, and storage functions, but usually do not have data processing and control functions. For example, Cellular modems can be used in fields such as electricity, water conservancy, and whether to allow real-time monitoring and data collection of remote devices.

Gateways are mainly used in scenarios such as device interconnection and intelligent control and are usually used to connect devices of different protocols and manufacturers to the same network. With functions such as protocol conversion, data processing, and control, the gateway can realize the interconnection between devices. For example, a gateway in a smart home system can connect different brands and types of smart devices in a home to the same network to realize intelligent control and linkage.

Therefore, the applications of Cellular modems and gateways are different and need to be selected based on specific application scenarios. Cellular modems are preferred if they require remote monitoring and data collection. Gateways are available for functions such as device interconnection and intelligent control.