The guiding principle of this laboratory is to work with students to build a scalable and practical IoT infrastructure. For this purpose, IoT devices are usually securely integrated into the THM EI IoT Cloud via wireless network interfaces.
The infrastructure consists of:
- IoT devices (e.g., ESP32, Arduino, RPI) with network interfaces such as WiFi, LoRa, Bluetooth, NB-IoT (5G)
- gateways and APIs, e.g., EMQX, The Things Network, or proprietary LoRa gateways
- a modular, container-based cloud backbone with Docker & Kubernetes
- applications such as Node-RED, InfluxDB, Grafana, and Portainer, which enable analysis, visualization, and management
- support for common IoT protocols such as MQTT(S), CoAP, HTTP(S), WebSockets, and AMQP
Students can contribute their own ideas and use cases to the system as part of project work, lecture-accompanying internships, seminars, or theses by connecting new sensors, developing dashboards, or integrating external APIs. The system thus offers an ideal environment for experiencing and helping to shape the technologies of tomorrow in a practical way.
Technological infrastructure, equipment, and platforms
Development platforms & tools
- THM EI IoT Cloud (Docker, Kubernetes, Portainer)
- Node-RED (Flow based IoT programming)
- Arduino IDE, PlatformIO, Eclipse, Geany, GCC
- Android Studio (for mobile IoT apps)
- Visual Studio Code (with IoT-/MQTT extensions)
- CloudFoundry (legacy)
Communication protocols
- MQTT / MQTT over WebSocket
- CoAP, HTTP/HTTPS (REST-APIs)
- OPC UA (for industrial communication)
- TCP/IP, UDP, IPv6, 6LoWPAN
- TLS/SSL, DTLS (for secure data transmission)
Databases & Backend Systems
- InfluxDB, TimescaleDB (time based IoT data)
- PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB (NoSQL)
- Grafana for visualizing sensor data
IoT devices & hardware platforms
- WLAN, Ethernet
- Bluetooth LE (BLE), ZigBee
- LoRa / LoRaWAN (via proprietary gateways & The Things Network)
- NB-IoT, LTE (including SIM-based IoT connection)