Control Your Local IoT Network from the Cloud

Secrets of “Cloud Relaying” Revealed

- By Gamal Labib

Your surveillance cameras can be managed using the vendor's proprietary application on a smartphone. This works smoothly from within the local network and from the Cloud, without the need to alter your network configuration. How do they do it? Can you control any IoT gadget in the same manner? The answer is “yes” if you know the right techniques.

Vendors of smart gadgets and appliances such as surveillance cameras, plugs, lights, and switches support the integration of their products into personal Internet of Things (IoT) networks. They also provide smartphone applications that enable homeowners to access and control such products whenever their phones have access to their network either locally or via the Internet. The feature of such applications that makes them so useful is that they access the vendor's products seamlessly from both inside and outside the user's network, and require no configuration changes to the network to gain access to it from the Internet (see Figure 1).

The secret behind such capability is “cloud-relaying,” in which the IoT gadget, such as an Internet Protocol (IP) camera, streams its multimedia captures to a vendor's server in the Cloud, which in turn relays that stream to the vendor's application on the user's smartphone. The communication between the gadget and the cloud server does not require any specific configuration on the LAN router, because outward streaming traffic from the gadget is similar to what a web browser does while communicating with a web server.