mcp-edge 0.1.0

Extend the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to edge and IoT devices: a bridging gateway, a lightweight MCP-Lite server, and a four-tier device taxonomy.

MCP-Edge

Extend the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to edge and IoT devices.

MCP-Edge lets cloud LLM agents discover and invoke physical hardware through the same tool interface they already use for software APIs. It provides:

• a gateway that bridges cloud-native MCP transports (SSE / HTTP) to constrained device channels (UART, BLE, local Wi-Fi), presenting every downstream device as a standard MCP tool provider;
• MCP-Lite, a lightweight MCP server for devices with as little as ~512 KB of RAM;
• a four-tier device taxonomy (constrained MCUs, smart IoT nodes, BLE-only wearables, Linux-class edge computers) that maps an MCP strategy to each tier;
• protocol adaptations for constrained links: CBOR encoding, schema caching, connection pooling, and offline request buffering.

Status: alpha, under active development. The public API is unstable and will change. This repository is a reference implementation of the framework described in the MCP-Edge paper (IEEE Cloud Summit 2026). Performance figures reported in the paper are projected estimates, not measurements taken from this codebase. This release exercises the full gateway path against simulated devices; real serial/BLE/Wi-Fi transports arrive in a later version.

Installation

Requires Python 3.10+.

pip install mcp-edge

For development, install from source:

git clone https://github.com/jemsbhai/mcp-edge
cd mcp-edge
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Quickstart

Run a demo gateway — an MCP server exposing two simulated devices over stdio:

mcp-edge run --demo

This serves a simulated sensor (read_temp, read_humidity) and a simulated ring (heart_rate), each tool namespaced by device (sensor-01/read_temp, ...). To drive it from an MCP client such as the MCP Inspector or Claude Desktop, configure a stdio server with command mcp-edge and arguments ["run", "--demo"]. The process logs to stderr and waits for a client on stdin.

Use the gateway as a library:

import asyncio

from mcp_edge.client import MCPLiteClient
from mcp_edge.devices import SimulatedDevice
from mcp_edge.gateway import Gateway
from mcp_edge.registry import DeviceRegistry
from mcp_edge.tiers import Tier
from mcp_edge.transports import LoopbackTransport


async def main() -> None:
    device = SimulatedDevice("sensor-01")
    device.add_tool("read_temp", lambda args: {"celsius": 21.5})

    transport = LoopbackTransport(device.handle)
    await transport.open()

    registry = DeviceRegistry()
    registry.register("sensor-01", MCPLiteClient(transport), Tier.SMART_NODE)

    gateway = Gateway(registry)
    print([tool["name"] for tool in await gateway.list_tools()])  # ['sensor-01/read_temp']
    print(await gateway.call_tool("sensor-01/read_temp", {}))     # {'celsius': 21.5}


asyncio.run(main())

Roadmap

• v0.1 — gateway core, in-process (loopback) transport, protocol adaptations (CBOR, schema caching, connection pooling, offline buffering), device simulator, health monitor, CLI, hermetic CI
• v0.2 — real transports (pyserial UART/USB, BLE, Wi-Fi/mDNS) and Wokwi firmware-in-the-loop tests (Arduino / ESP32 / RP2040)
• v0.2+ — Edge Impulse (inference as an MCP tool) and Arduino IoT Cloud (properties as MCP) integration examples; Renode / QEMU backends

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest -q
ruff check .

License

MIT — see LICENSE.