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.

Installation

Requires Python 3.10+. Not yet published to PyPI — install from source:

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Optional transport backends:

pip install "mcp-edge[serial]"   # UART / USB serial devices
pip install "mcp-edge[ble]"      # BLE devices
pip install "mcp-edge[wifi]"     # local Wi-Fi / mDNS discovery

Related MCP server: mcp2tcp

Quickstart

Coming soon — the gateway and device simulator land in upcoming releases.

Roadmap

• v0.1 — gateway core, serial + simulated transports, protocol adaptations, device simulator, CLI, hermetic CI

• v0.1–0.2 — 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

python -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1     # PowerShell (Windows); use `source .venv/bin/activate` on Unix
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest -q
ruff check .

License

MIT — see LICENSE.