Capillary networks - bridging the cellular and IoT worlds

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a new revolutionary era of computing technology that enables a wide variety of devices to interoperate through the existing Internet infrastructure. The potential of this era is boundless, bringing in new communication opportunities in which ubiquitous devices blend seamlessly with the environment and embrace every aspect of our lives. Capillary networks will be a fundamental part of the IoT development, enabling local wireless sensor networks to connect to and efficiently use the capabilities of cellular networks through gateways. As a result, a vast range of constrained devices equipped with only short-range radio can utilize the cellular network capabilities to gain global connectivity, supported with the security, management and virtualization services of the cellular network. This paper introduces a new Capillary Network Platform and describes the rich set of functionalities that this platform enables. To show their practical value, the functionalities are applied to a set of typical scenarios. The aim of this paper is to give the reader insight about the Capillary Network Platform and illustrate how this work can be used to enhance the existing IoT networks and tackle their problems.