Why is the Lobaro Platform mandatory for NB-IoT Sensors & Gateways?

This common question often arises from integrators who run their own type of IoT platform tailored to a particular use-case. In contrast to this our platform is primary considered for device management of Lobaro and 3rd party sensors and gateways. It's meant as secure abstraction layer to the actual hardware complexity and gives the following benefits to the integrator or end-user:

• Asymmetrically encrypted data transfers, client and server certificate-based, using DTLS, while still being able to use battery life friendly UDP transfers with little overhead.
• Administration of client and server certificates.
• Remote configuration of sensors via simple APIs (HTTPS PUSH, REST, MQTT, SFTP).
• Support for Firmware Updates Over The Air (FOTA).
• Good system scalability, even with many thousands of data nodes.
• Intermediate storage for sensor data before further processing in the downstream platform.
• Simple interface independent of downstream platform with CSV export of data for simple applications.
• Possibility of merging sensors of different wireless technologies (e.g. NB-IoT, LoRaWAN, wireless MBUS) with a uniform API to the downstream system.
• Quickly bring IoT applications to market by focusing on the use case and the actual data without having to deal with hardware and firmware implementation details or secure data transfers from the sensor / gateway.
• Usually low hardware requirements for the server on which the on-premise instance of the Lobaro Platform is installed. Often it can run in parallel on a server next to the use-case specific platform.
• Internal APIs between hardware and Lobaro Platform can be changed, e.g. for firmware extensions, without compromising a stable API to the downstream system and thus increasing the stability of the end application.

As you can see, all these functions require a high level of knowledge about the hardware and how it works. Lobaro can only support and guarantee the correct functioning of its hardware if the Lobaro platform is used. A direct connection to our hardware could be discussed for projects with very large numbers of hardware sold, as there is usually an adequate budget to do this. In the vast majority of cases, the manageable prices for using the Lobaro Platform as SaaS or on-premise are the economically much better option and create less overhead on both sides.