9,726 research outputs found
Wearable Communications in 5G: Challenges and Enabling Technologies
As wearable devices become more ingrained in our daily lives, traditional
communication networks primarily designed for human being-oriented applications
are facing tremendous challenges. The upcoming 5G wireless system aims to
support unprecedented high capacity, low latency, and massive connectivity. In
this article, we evaluate key challenges in wearable communications. A
cloud/edge communication architecture that integrates the cloud radio access
network, software defined network, device to device communications, and
cloud/edge technologies is presented. Computation offloading enabled by this
multi-layer communications architecture can offload computation-excessive and
latency-stringent applications to nearby devices through device to device
communications or to nearby edge nodes through cellular or other wireless
technologies. Critical issues faced by wearable communications such as short
battery life, limited computing capability, and stringent latency can be
greatly alleviated by this cloud/edge architecture. Together with the presented
architecture, current transmission and networking technologies, including
non-orthogonal multiple access, mobile edge computing, and energy harvesting,
can greatly enhance the performance of wearable communication in terms of
spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, latency, and connectivity.Comment: This work has been accepted by IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazin
Survey on wireless technology trade-offs for the industrial internet of things
Aside from vast deployment cost reduction, Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (IWSAN) introduce a new level of industrial connectivity. Wireless connection of sensors and actuators in industrial environments not only enables wireless monitoring and actuation, it also enables coordination of production stages, connecting mobile robots and autonomous transport vehicles, as well as localization and tracking of assets. All these opportunities already inspired the development of many wireless technologies in an effort to fully enable Industry 4.0. However, different technologies significantly differ in performance and capabilities, none being capable of supporting all industrial use cases. When designing a network solution, one must be aware of the capabilities and the trade-offs that prospective technologies have. This paper evaluates the technologies potentially suitable for IWSAN solutions covering an entire industrial site with limited infrastructure cost and discusses their trade-offs in an effort to provide information for choosing the most suitable technology for the use case of interest. The comparative discussion presented in this paper aims to enable engineers to choose the most suitable wireless technology for their specific IWSAN deployment
Enabling Micro-level Demand-Side Grid Flexiblity in Resource Constrained Environments
The increased penetration of uncertain and variable renewable energy presents
various resource and operational electric grid challenges. Micro-level
(household and small commercial) demand-side grid flexibility could be a
cost-effective strategy to integrate high penetrations of wind and solar
energy, but literature and field deployments exploring the necessary
information and communication technologies (ICTs) are scant. This paper
presents an exploratory framework for enabling information driven grid
flexibility through the Internet of Things (IoT), and a proof-of-concept
wireless sensor gateway (FlexBox) to collect the necessary parameters for
adequately monitoring and actuating the micro-level demand-side. In the summer
of 2015, thirty sensor gateways were deployed in the city of Managua
(Nicaragua) to develop a baseline for a near future small-scale demand response
pilot implementation. FlexBox field data has begun shedding light on
relationships between ambient temperature and load energy consumption, load and
building envelope energy efficiency challenges, latency communication network
challenges, and opportunities to engage existing demand-side user behavioral
patterns. Information driven grid flexibility strategies present great
opportunity to develop new technologies, system architectures, and
implementation approaches that can easily scale across regions, incomes, and
levels of development
Enabling Communication Technologies for Automated Unmanned Vehicles in Industry 4.0
Within the context of Industry 4.0, mobile robot systems such as automated
guided vehicles (AGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are one of the major
areas challenging current communication and localization technologies. Due to
stringent requirements on latency and reliability, several of the existing
solutions are not capable of meeting the performance required by industrial
automation applications. Additionally, the disparity in types and applications
of unmanned vehicle (UV) calls for more flexible communication technologies in
order to address their specific requirements. In this paper, we propose several
use cases for UVs within the context of Industry 4.0 and consider their
respective requirements. We also identify wireless technologies that support
the deployment of UVs as envisioned in Industry 4.0 scenarios.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl
Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) using Interface Diversity
An important ingredient of the future 5G systems will be Ultra-Reliable
Low-Latency Communication (URLLC). A way to offer URLLC without intervention in
the baseband/PHY layer design is to use interface diversity and integrate
multiple communication interfaces, each interface based on a different
technology. In this work, we propose to use coding to seamlessly distribute
coded payload and redundancy data across multiple available communication
interfaces. We formulate an optimization problem to find the payload allocation
weights that maximize the reliability at specific target latency values. In
order to estimate the performance in terms of latency and reliability of such
an integrated communication system, we propose an analysis framework that
combines traditional reliability models with technology-specific latency
probability distributions. Our model is capable to account for failure
correlation among interfaces/technologies. By considering different scenarios,
we find that optimized strategies can in some cases significantly outperform
strategies based on -out-of- erasure codes, where the latter do not
account for the characteristics of the different interfaces. The model has been
validated through simulation and is supported by experimental results.Comment: Accepted for IEEE Transactions on Communication
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