Routing functions

When considering IoT architecture, the router plays a significant role in the overall management, scaling, and security of a system. Often, it is the case that the role of a router is trivialized to simply act as a gateway from one protocol to another (cellular to Bluetooth converter). For a commercial or industrial deployment, significantly more needs to be considered, especially when devices are in remote and moving systems.

Gateway functions

We have covered several types of wireless communication in this book, all of which require some form of transmitter and receiver as well as a mechanism to bridge traffic to the internet. This is the single most important role of the IoT edge gateway. Whether the medium is a Bluetooth mesh requiring a bridge node or a cellular network eNodeB, the roles are similar. The gateway bridges and marshals data between two dissimilar networks. 

A router can be a gateway. Routers manage and steer traffic between similar networks. In IoT architecture...