Dexatek IoT smart devices and back-end management solution

Introduction

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), enterprises aim to efficiently integrate, configure, monitor, and manage numerous edge devices. These devices and server systems must be highly secure and reliable, as they often become targets for hackers. Regular reviews, security encryption updates, and robust authentication and authorization mechanisms are necessary to ensure data privacy and uninterrupted operation. As the number of edge devices and users increase, significant human resources are needed to enhance reliability, security, real-time monitoring, and server scaling to meet growing demands.

To reduce user wait times and address the issue of insufficient computing power on edge devices, traditional system architectures use HTTP as the primary communication protocol between servers, edge devices, and clients. However, when the server and edge device are far apart or face network instability, longer response times can cause unexpected problems. Immediate responses are required when an edge device’s status changes or an issue arises, necessitating significant server resources to balance the load and improve the efficiency of timely reporting.

Additionally, rapid market changes, shorter product life cycles, and compatibility issues between various edge devices and platforms require substantial development, integration, and testing time. Traditional methods struggle to keep up with market expansion due to the insufficient processing speed of IoT data, preventing flexible platform scaling.

Challenges in creating IoT smart devices and back-end management include efficient edge device management, reducing operational costs, ensuring end device security, and helping customers optimize operations and increase revenue. This requires domain knowledge to build, implement, and scale solutions. In this blog, we will explore how using Dexatek partner solutions can help overcome these challenges. Through the AWS optimized platform, complete solutions can be built and deployed quickly to significantly reduce operational overhead, allowing customers to focus on development and growth.

Remote Device Management

Building an IoT smart device and back-end management solution today poses challenges for traditional remote device management methods:

• High maintenance costs: Regular security verification of edge devices, clients, and server systems, along with real-time traffic monitoring and manual scaling of instances, are necessary to ensure the reliability of edge device connections and data transmission. These tasks consume significant time, manpower, and operational costs.
• Poor user experience: Varying edge device capabilities, unstable internet quality, distance from the server, and load levels contribute to delays and disconnections, leading to functional abnormalities and greatly impacting the user experience.
• Time to market delay: The slow pace of launching new products or features fails to meet market demands. Varying edge device performance results in long integration testing cycles, and limited flexibility in system architecture makes it challenging to add new features to meet customer needs.

To address these challenges and achieve operational efficiency, real-time responsiveness, and scalability to meet market demands, a cloud-native architecture offers several advantages:

• Reducing operational and manpower costs: Leveraging serverless computing services reduces infrastructure management, automatically scaling the system to ensure efficient operation during peak times. This eliminates the need for cumbersome procedures like manual scaling and maintenance, ultimately lowering overall costs and enhancing the system’s sustainability and environmental friendliness.
• Enhancing security: End devices utilize X.509 certificates for authentication, granting access permissions to edge devices and users and ensuring secure data transmission. The latest TLS encryption standards safeguard edge devices, users, and the system from potential threats.
• Improving user experience: Adopting MQTT, a lightweight, publish-subscribe, machine-to-machine network protocol, replaces HTTP, enhancing connections with remote locations that have devices with resource constraints or limited network bandwidth.
• Rapid and flexible customization: Meeting market demands becomes easier, enabling the quick launch of new features or products. This agility allows employees to focus on implementing differentiated features and increasing company profits.

Dexatek IoT Solution for Smart Devices and Back-end Management Systems

The Dexatek IoT solution powered, by the AWS cloud, effectively addresses these limitations. Manufacturers from various industries have found success using Dexatek to develop remote device management without requiring coding or domain expertise. In essence, Dexatek can swiftly transform any edge device into a connected device, enabling remote monitoring and management through applications and back-end systems.

On the edge device side, a mature cloud module operates across different hardware environments. This module is seamlessly integrated into edge devices during development and integration, facilitating data communication between the IoT Core and edge devices, thereby simplifying the process of turning any edge device into a connected one. In the cloud, the architecture can be rapidly deployed using AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), allowing users and edge devices to come online immediately after deployment.

The combination of AWS and Dexatek creates a secure smart device and back-end management cloud platform, offering a solution with excellent user experience, ease of management, and maintainability. Key features of this solution include a highly scalable model incorporating edge devices, AWS IoT Core, AWS Lambda serverless service, Amazon DynamoDB, and more. This architecture ensures efficient and secure communication between edge devices and cloud services, while enabling easy scalability of the back-end management system:

• 1. Edge devices authenticate using IoT Certificates and communicate in real-time with AWS IoT Core via MQTT.
  2. Users authenticate through Amazon Cognito and receive time-limited authorization to access relevant data from Amazon API Gateway, communicating in real-time with AWS IoT Core.
  3. Edge devices and users communicate in real-time through AWS IoT Core.
  4. Data entering AWS IoT Core can be stored or trigger other actions after passing through the IoT Rule Engine or Lambda.
  5. Amazon CloudWatch and AWS IoT Device Management are utilized to build a back-end management system tailored to meet customer needs.

Figure 1: Dexatek IoT Solution Architecture

Dexatek IoT Solution Customer Use Case

Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning Sales Taiwan Co. (JCH-TW) aimed to develop smart air conditioning products. Previously, their solution required a lengthy process of building servers, databases, API servers, and MQTT servers, taking at least 6 months. However, by collaborating with Dexatek and AWS, they streamlined the development process, reducing setup to deployment time to just 3 months. This resulted in a nearly 50% reduction in overall development time and human resources. In the old solution, developing new features often took over 3 weeks due to limited flexibility, whereas the new solution enables the development, testing, and deployment of new features within a week.

In terms of user feedback, the old solution had a delay of 3-5 seconds for device control and status feedback, whereas the new solution improved response speed to just 0.2-0.4 seconds – a nearly 90% enhancement. This immediate improvement in user experience led to positive feedback, prompting JCH-TW to integrate all high-end products with the new solution to enhance market competitiveness. Regarding user count, edge device onboarding, firmware version management, and remote device issue handling can now be centralized in the back-end management system, minimizing operational costs. This solution enables customers to develop smart air conditioning products, allowing consumers to remotely monitor and control them, thereby achieving energy savings and carbon reduction while enhancing the brand image.

Conclusion

The collaboration between Dexatek and AWS introduces a new solution that not only achieves automated management through AWS’s serverless computing architecture and auto-scaling services, reducing personnel operation and maintenance costs while minimizing human errors, but also enhances the value and profitability of enterprise products. This solution maintains high security standards while improving product development efficiency. The integration of edge devices and backend management systems offers enterprises more intelligent and convenient products, enhancing user experience and meeting the demand for intelligence in modern life, thereby giving enterprises a competitive edge in the market.

In terms of industry impact, this solution brings significant benefits. Firstly, enterprises will gain over 30% additional resources for innovation and product development, propelling the entire industry towards a smarter and more innovative future. Secondly, in conjunction with AWS’s solution, there is a tenfold increase in processing performance, resulting in faster and more efficient data processing. Furthermore, development and testing time are reduced from 3 weeks to less than 1 week, enabling enterprises to launch new features more quickly and respond to market changes more flexibly. Most importantly, automated encryption and authentication ensure data security, providing a reliable IoT solution.

Dexatek is also continuously developing predictive maintenance and anomaly detection solutions using machine data, creating more energy-efficient products with electrical data, and improving after-sales repair efficiency for distribution channels with generative AI. If you’re considering building a new business model or enhancing your existing product, Dexatek IoT Solution on AWS can help you create an innovation solution.