Overview
This is a technical overview of the KPN Things platform. If your are more interested in the overview of features, you can check out the overview page in the Portal documentation.
The KPN Things Platform is the bridge between IoT Devices and IoT Applications. It offers a unified way of connecting Devices at the one side, and applications at the other side, making Devices and applications completely interchangeable in every IoT solution that uses KPN Things.
Device integration
Devices can communicate with the platform using one of our networks, LoRa or M2M (2G/3G/4G/LTE-M), or a Device using another network can get its data to and from KPN Things over the Internet.
When you use one of our networks to get your data in KPN Things, you will be able to do connectivity management in KPN Things.
Communication from your Device is called uplink communication. When data or commands are sent to your Device, it is called downlink communication. In the basis all communication with the KPN Things Platform should use the SenML data protocol, but data decoders are available to translate data from and to Devices that do not support SenML.
Application integration
KPN Things will connect to your application through a dedicated connection layer. To connect your application to KPN Things you can use one of the available Destination types. We have for instance support to connect plain HTTPS endpoints to KPN Things, but if you are developing in Microsoft Azure, you can connect directly to the Azure IoT Hub if you like.
The destination types that connect on a platform level can also provide the integration of certain configuration and management of objects in the platform. The Cumulocity connection for instance will create Device objects in the Cumulocity tenant for each Device that KPN Things sends data of.
Configuration / Management
The Configuration/Management component in KPN Things holds all data in its model that enables successful data processing. Also it contains all information needed to correctly manage and monitor solution built in KPN Things.
The KPN Things Portal is the website through which you can manage and monitor almost all parts of the KPN Things solutions. Soon, you will also be able to use KPN Things API's directly to manage your IoT solutions.
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