Protocol-specific middleware - Managed integrations for AWS IoT Device Management
Middleware architectureEnd-to-end middleware command flow example

Protocol-specific middleware

Important

The documentation and code provided here describes a reference implementation of the middleware. It is not provided to you as part of the SDK.

The protocol-specific middleware has a critical role of interacting with the underlying protocol stacks. Both device onboarding and device control components of the managed integrations Hub SDK use it to interact with the end device.

The middleware performs the following functions.

  • Abstracts the APIs from the device protocol stacks from different vendors by providing a common set of APIs.

  • Provides software execution management such as thread scheduler, event queue management, and data cache.

Middleware architecture

The block diagram below represents the architecture of the Zigbee middleware. The architecture of middlewares of other protocols like Z-Wave is also similar.

The protocol-specific middleware architecture and its components.

The protocol-specific middleware has three main components.

  • ACS Zigbee DPK: The Zigbee Device Porting Kit (DPK) is used to provide abstraction from the underlying hardware and operating system, thereby enabling portability. Basically this can be considered as the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), which provides a common set APIs to control and communicate with the Zigbee radios from different vendors. The Zigbee middleware contains DPK API implementation for the Silicon Labs Zigbee Application framework.

  • ACS Zigbee Service: The Zigbee service runs as a dedicated daemon. It includes an API handler serving the API calls from client applications through the IPC channels. AIPC is used as the IPC channel between Zigbee adaptor and Zigbee service. It provides other functionalities like handling both async/sync commands, handling events from the HAL, and using ACS Event Manager for event registering/publishing.

  • ACS Zigbee Adaptor: The Zigbee adaptor is a library running within the application process (in this case, the application is the CDMB plugin). The Zigbee adaptor provides a set of APIs which are consumed by client applications like CDMB/Provisioner protocol plugins to control and communicate with the end device.

End-to-end middleware command flow example

Here is an example of the command flow through the Zigbee middleware.

The protocol-specific middleware architecture and its components.

Here is an example of the command flow through the Z-Wave middleware.

The protocol-specific middleware architecture and its components.