WISE-PaaS 2.0 EI-Agent

EI-Agent – a software development framework to communicate between device and IoT/EI-PaaS Server.

Advantech provides a software development framework to communicate and exchange information between a device and IoT/EI-PaaS Server, called a EI-Agent framework.
The EI-Agent framework provides a rich set of user-friendly, intelligent and integrated interfaces, which speeds development, enhances security and makes agent application easier and simpler to communicate with IoT/EI-PaaS Server.
The framework has three benefits:

Standardization - The communication protocol is based on the MQTT protocol to communicate and exchange data with WISE-PaaS/RMM Server. The IoT sensor data report format is following the IPSO Spec. in JSON format.
Portability - Whole framework is written in C language and follow the ANSI C Standard, that C compilers are available for most systems and are often the first compiler provided for a new system.
Scalability - The WISE Agent Framework is functional partitioning into discrete scalable, reusable modules, and plug & playable.

Architecture

The EI-Agent Framework is extracted from Agent Client Module of WISEAgent Framework for several purpose:

Lightweight: Extract and implement common handshake protocol to communicate with WISE-PaaS 2.0 Server.
- User can implement a lightweight application to communicate with WISE-PaaS 2.0 Server easily.
Various Connectivity Protocol: Extract the Connectivity Part as a WISEConnector Module.
- In WISEConnector we can implement various connectivity protocol, such as: MQTT, AMPQ, Web Socket, HTTP, to migrate to different connectivity protocol easily.
- For now, we support the MQTT connectivity protocol.

Lightweight

To porting whole WISE Agent to a resource restricted platform is difficult. So we are trying to extract the core functions from Agent Client to a single library called WISE Core. And we can port this small library into resource restricted platform easier.

Various Connectivity Protocol

To support various connectivity protocols, we define the common connectivity APIs for WISE Agent, we called WISE Connector APIs. We can easily connect our WISE Agent to various Cloud Server by changing Connector Module at compile time, If those Connector Module is implemented with WISE Connector APIs. To support Microsoft Azure IoTHub, we need to implement a WISE Connector that integrate the Azure IoT Suite.