1. Overview
   1. What does the V-Raptor do?
   2. What are the benefits of the V-Raptor?
   3. Integration into the V-Raptor is done in one of two ways:
2. Capabilities of the V-Raptor
   1. Acts as an intermediary buffer
   2. Serves as a device and communication abstraction layer
   3. Aggregates, decodes and normalises data
   4. Authentication and Authorisation
   5. Telemetry pipeline
   6. Telemetry data storage in transit (DSIT)

Overview

What does the V-Raptor do?

The Virtual Raptor (or better known, the V-Raptor) is a virtual IoT gateway. It only makes use of network, or non-wired, communication protocols. It is a modular system that consists of a small group of loosely coupled micro-services that, together, provide a telemetry pipeline capable of ingesting, transforming and transmitting telemetry securely, in real-time, from a wide variety of devices and protocols to the Commander™ platform.

What are the benefits of the V-Raptor?

• Easily scalable
• Simple to deploy
• Easy to maintain
• Secure
• Modern management interface
• Designed for rapid integration
• Provides automatic failover support¹
• Supports push and pull communication
• Translate engineering (sentinel) values
• Able to scale and transform data values

Integration into the V-Raptor is done in one of two ways:

• via a variety of simple communication interfaces, such as HTTP or MQTT; or
• via the deployment of a micro-service, which is known in IoT.nxt as a device driver. This device driver then serves as the communication interface using network-based protocols.

Capabilities of the V-Raptor

Acts as an intermediary buffer

Inside the IoT.nxt ecosystem, the V-Raptor can also be used as a intermediary buffer, or load-balancer, between the Commander platform and the Edge Raptor™ or the Micro Raptor™.

A benefit of this function is that edge Raptors (Edge Raptor and Micro Raptor) can be deployed, configured and monitored at scale securely.

Serves as a device and communication abstraction layer

Different types of devices have different protocols, and the way the devices communication over the protocol differs too. With Raptor, these data sets being read from the device can be converted from complex registers with different standards, into user friendly nomenclature to ease the consumption of data. This is independent of the device protocol or make and model and provides a single view of connectivity to all linked devices.

Register ==> Friendly name

ie: 
ABC123   ==> Voltage

Aggregates, decodes and normalises data

Devices connected to the V-Raptor, which contain data payloads and device metadata (make, model, protocol, etc), can be extracted by the V-Raptor and converted this into telemetry. The V-Raptor will receive real-time data from this device, but can also do a rest call, which allows the V-Raptor to fetch additional information, which will then be pieced together with the real-time telemetry to provide a more consumable group of data describing the environment.

Authentication and Authorisation

The V-Raptor boasts a hybrid authentication model, designed to add layers of security. This means that the V-Raptor caters for an integrated authentication system with the Commander platform as well as a system that operated independently. This is necessary because devices don’t always offer OAuth Authentication, and if there is no network access, devices will not always be able to connect to Commander to allow for user access. Thus, the V-Raptor has a self-contained authentication layer for integrations which has a certificate-based mode, or API key. Additional modes are possible if required, with some development. For older, dumber, devices, a layer of security can be added via a device authorisation module to allow the developer of the device driver to add an access control list for a device.

Telemetry pipeline

This is a generic transport layer that IoT.nxt^® has built that supports a wide variety of data types. There are a few benefits of this V-Raptor feature, which are discussed below.

• The telemetry pipeline is designed to provide as high a throughput as possible, guaranteeing delivery, by making use of Telemetry Data Storage in Transit (DSIT) [see point 6. below].
• The telemetry pipeline contains a mutual authentication layer between all services using the pipeline, done via the bearer token system, adding a level of security to the data. This means that the identity of each service sending or receiving data is verified before the data can flow.
• A large number of gateways and devices can be supported at once on the V-Raptor

Telemetry data storage in transit (DSIT)

This is a durable messaging system that ensures no data is lost, as everything is stored in the V-Raptor before it is sent further in the telemetry pipeline, no matter the amount of data traffic going through the V-Raptor. It provides a level of autonomy, in that during updates, the device driver can continue to receiver information from devices and store that information until the telemetry pipeline becomes available again.