One of the most significant features of the Fusion Connect platform is its ability to synchronize with a wide variety of different devices. To be sure, communication with devices is not absolutely necessary for every account; for example, a warehouse inventory application or special accounting system may not need any direct device connection to view data, and could rely instead upon users submitting forms to change the state of resources or the system itself. Intuitively, though, most IoT applications are based upon directly receiving data from devices; a Taxi monitoring application needs to directly receive data about the location and status of each taxi. To accomplish this, the platform contains a number of built-in device adapters that allows it to send and receive messages from devices using many different communication protocols. Using these, an application can simultaneously communicate with GPS trackers using MQTT, temperature sensors using TCP, energy meters using HTTP, and any number of other disparate devices.
In order to enable communication with physical devices, Fusion Connect staff will connect an account to a Data Gateway on the server when that account is created, which listens for or fetches device messages using one of Fusion Connect's cloud adapters. Once these steps are performed at account creation, the Fusion Connect platform provides two components for managing device connectivity: Device Profiles, and Devices. A Device Profile is a profile that defines the information that a device will send to the platform (over one of the communication protocols enabled for the account) and the Resource Type to which devices with that profile will be linked. Devices are then instantiated in the system, given a Device Profile and assigned to a Data Gateway, and will serve as the representation of a physical device in the system. Both of these components will be discussed in the enclosed sections.