The importance of IoT is virtually unquestionable, in part due to the huge number of applications available and under development. Although the deployment and use of a large number of IoT devices already become a reality, the theme is still considered extremely important for both industry and academia.

Among IoT applications, intelligent environments, such as smart city and campus, are highlighted. The campus can be seen as a reduced version of the city with several similar characteristics, for example, it is an environment with intense mobility of people and there are issues related to mobility, parking, security, food, social interaction, etc. On the other hand, the smaller size, simpler management, and access to the entire campus physical infrastructure make it easier to deploy and test solutions more quickly. Thus, the university campus is a suitable laboratory for testing solutions for intelligent IoT-based environments. Intelligent campus is the main application context of this project.

In this context, the SOFTWAY4IoT project aims to address four basic problems. 1) Need to support multiple wireless technologies for IoT, e.g., BLE, ZigBee, Z-Wave, LoRa/LoRaWAN, 2G/3G, NB-IoT. 2) Need to minimize the impact of choosing a wireless technology for IoT not yet consolidated. 3) Public exposure of IoT devices on the Internet, i.e., potential risks related to the network security of the devices. 4) Device connectivity to the infrastructure for data collection and processing, typically a cloud computing infrastructure.

Problems will be addressed through a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Software-Defined Radio (SDR) gateway. With SDN, you can create isolated virtual networks and implement network security policies quickly and flexibly. SDR will enable wireless communication with multiple technologies using only one physical interface and also update or replace these technologies through software-only changes. In addition, the project will include the integration of the communication gateway with a fog computing infrastructure to provide greater assurance for the connectivity between sensors/actuators and the application “intelligence”, as well as support applications that require low latency and facilitate the virtualization of the solution components.