LPWAN Technologies: Emerging Application Characteristics, Requirements, and Design Considerations

Low power wide area network (LPWAN) is a promising solution for long range and low power Internet of Things (IoT) and machine to machine (M2M) communication applications. This paper focuses on defining a systematic and powerful approach of identifying the key characteristics of such applications, translating them into explicit requirements, and then deriving the associated design considerations. LPWANs are resource-constrained networks and are primarily characterized by long battery life operation, extended coverage, high capacity, and low device and deployment costs. These characteristics translate into a key set of requirements including M2M traffic management, massive capacity, energy efficiency, low power operations, extended coverage, security, and interworking. The set of corresponding design considerations is identified in terms of two categories, desired or expected ones and enhanced ones, which reflect the wide range of characteristics associated with LPWAN-based applications. Prominent design constructs include admission and user traffic management, interference management, energy saving modes of operation, lightweight media access control (MAC) protocols, accurate location identification, security coverage techniques, and flexible software re-configurability. Topological and architectural options for interconnecting LPWAN entities are discussed. The major proprietary and standards-based LPWAN technology solutions available in the marketplace are presented. These include Sigfox, LoRaWAN, Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), and long term evolution (LTE)-M, among others. The relevance of upcoming cellular 5G technology and its complementary relationship with LPWAN technology are also discussed

Massive MIMO for Dependable Communication

Cellular communication is constantly evolving; currently 5G systems are being deployed and research towards 6G is ongoing. Three use cases have been discussed as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communication (mMTC), and ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). To fulfill the requirements of these use cases, new technologies are needed and one enabler is massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). By increasing the number of antennas at the base station side, data rates can be increased, more users can be served simultaneously, and there is a potential to improve reliability. In addition, it is possible to achieve better coverage, improved energy efficiency, and low-complex user devices. The performance of any wireless system is limited by the underlying channels. Massive MIMO channels have shown several beneficial properties: the array gain stemming from the combining of the signals from the many antennas, improved user separation due to favourable propagation -- where the user channels become pair-wise orthogonal -- and the channel hardening effect, where the variations of channel gain decreases as the number of antennas increases. Previous theoretical works have commonly assumed independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) complex Gaussian channels. However, in the first studies on massive MIMO channels, it was shown that common outdoor and indoor environments are not that rich in scattering, but that the channels are rather spatially correlated. To enable the above use cases, investigations are needed for the targeted environments. This thesis focuses on the benefits of deploying massive MIMO systems to achieve dependable communication in a number of scenarios related to the use cases. The first main area is the study of an industrial environment and aims at characterizing and modeling massive MIMO channels to assess the possibility of achieving the requirements of URLLC in a factory context. For example, a unique fully distributed array is deployed with the aim to further exploit spatial diversity. The other main area concerns massive MIMO at sub-GHz, a previously unexplored area. The channel characteristics when deploying a physically very large array for IoT networks are explored. To conclude, massive MIMO can indeed bring great advantages when trying to achieve dependable communication. Although channels in regular indoor environments are not i.i.d. complex Gaussian, the model can be justified in rich scattering industrial environments. Due to massive MIMO, the small-scale fading effects are reduced and when deploying a distributed array also the large-scale fading effects are reduced. In the Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenario, the channel is not as rich scattering. In this use case one can benefit from the array gain to extend coverage and improved energy efficiency, and diversity is gained due to the physically large array

Next-generation IoT devices: sustainable eco-friendly manufacturing, energy harvesting, and wireless connectivity

This invited paper presents potential solutions for tackling some of the main underlying challenges toward developing sustainable Internet-of-things (IoT) devices with a focus on eco-friendly manufacturing, sustainable powering, and wireless connectivity for next-generation IoT devices. The diverse applications of IoT systems, such as smart cities, wearable devices, self-driving cars, and industrial automation, are driving up the number of IoT systems at an unprecedented rate. In recent years, the rapidly-increasing number of IoT devices and the diverse application-specific system requirements have resulted in a paradigm shift in manufacturing processes, powering methods, and wireless connectivity solutions. The traditional cloud-centering IoT systems are moving toward distributed intelligence schemes that impose strict requirements on IoT devices, e.g., operating range, latency, and reliability. In this article, we provide an overview of hardware-related research trends and application use cases of emerging IoT systems and highlight the enabling technologies of next-generation IoT. We review eco-friendly manufacturing for next-generation IoT devices, present alternative biodegradable and eco-friendly options to replace existing materials, and discuss sustainable powering IoT devices by exploiting energy harvesting and wireless power transfer. Finally, we present (ultra-)low-power wireless connectivity solutions that meet the stringent energy efficiency and data rate requirements of future IoT systems that are compatible with a batteryless operation

6G—Enabling the New Smart City: A Survey

Smart cities and 6G are technological areas that have the potential to transform the way we live and work in the years to come. Until this transformation comes into place, there is the need, underlined by research and market studies, for a critical reassessment of the entire wireless communication sector for smart cities, which should include the IoT infrastructure, economic factors that could improve their adoption rate, and strategies that enable smart city operations. Therefore, from a technical point of view, a series of stringent issues, such as interoperability, data privacy, security, the digital divide, and implementation issues have to be addressed. Notably, to concentrate the scrutiny on smart cities and the forthcoming influence of 6G, the groundwork laid by the current 5G, with its multifaceted role and inherent limitations within the domain of smart cities, is embraced as a foundational standpoint. This examination culminates in a panoramic exposition, extending beyond the mere delineation of the 6G standard toward the unveiling of the extensive gamut of potential applications that this emergent standard promises to introduce to the smart cities arena. This paper provides an update on the SC ecosystem around the novel paradigm of 6G, aggregating a series of enabling technologies accompanied by the descriptions of their roles and specific employment schemes

Real-time wireless networks for industrial control systems

The next generation of industrial systems (Industry 4.0) will dramatically transform manyproductive sectors, integrating emerging concepts such as Internet of Things, artificialintelligence, big data, cloud robotics and virtual reality, to name a few. Most of thesetechnologies heavily rely on the availability of communication networks able to offernearly–istantaneous, secure and reliable data transfer. In the industrial sector, these tasks are nowadays mainly accomplished by wired networks, that combine the speed ofoptical fiber media with collision–free switching technology. However, driven by the pervasive deployment of mobile devices for personal com-munications in the last years, more and more industrial applications require wireless connectivity, which can bring enormous advantages in terms of cost reduction and flex-ibility. Designing timely, reliable and deterministic industrial wireless networks is a complicated task, due to the nature of the wireless channel, intrinsically error–prone andshared among all the devices transmitting on the same frequency band. In this thesis, several solutions to enhance the performance of wireless networks employed in industrial control applications are proposed. The presented approaches differ in terms of achieved performance and target applications, but they are all characterized by an improvement over existing industrial wireless solutions in terms of timeliness, reliability and determinism. When possible, an experimental validation of the designed solutions is provided. The obtained results prove that significant performance improvements are already possible, often using commercially available devices and preserving compliance to existing standards. Future research efforts, combined with the availability of new chipsets and standards, could lead to a world where wireless links effectively replace most of the existing cables in industrial environments, as it is already the case in the consumer market

Planning the future of smart cities with swarms of fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles using a novel framework

The autonomy of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - self-governing in the aerospace discipline has been a remarkable research area with the development of the advanced bespoke microcontrollers embedded with advanced AI techniques for the last several decades. The road forward about the operational environment is certain about the swarms of fully automated UAVs (FAUAVs), that is, urban areas. Therefore, the planning the future of cities with swarms of fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles is explored in this paper to optimise the use of this type of autonomy with a diverse range of applications and a contemporary methodology is proposed using a synergistic holistic framework equipped with various effective and efficient techniques along with a novel FAUAV routing approach customisable to the constraints of FAUAVs and urban areas. The framework consists of a decentralized agent-based control architecture that monitors and controls the swarms of resource-constraint FAUAVs for their real-time requirements in optimising their urban uses. The results demonstrate that the constraints of FAUAVs can be mitigated significantly in urban areas and their use in realising their diverse range of missions can be optimised using the proposed methodology

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Internet of Everything: Opportunities and Challenges

The recent advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have further extended Internet of Things (IoT) from the sole "things" aspect to the omnipotent role of "intelligent connection of things". Meanwhile, the concept of internet of everything (IoE) is presented as such an omnipotent extension of IoT. However, the IoE realization meets critical challenges including the restricted network coverage and the limited resource of existing network technologies. Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have attracted significant attentions attributed to their high mobility, low cost, and flexible deployment. Thus, UAVs may potentially overcome the challenges of IoE. This article presents a comprehensive survey on opportunities and challenges of UAV-enabled IoE. We first present three critical expectations of IoE: 1) scalability requiring a scalable network architecture with ubiquitous coverage, 2) intelligence requiring a global computing plane enabling intelligent things, 3) diversity requiring provisions of diverse applications. Thereafter, we review the enabling technologies to achieve these expectations and discuss four intrinsic constraints of IoE (i.e., coverage constraint, battery constraint, computing constraint, and security issues). We then present an overview of UAVs. We next discuss the opportunities brought by UAV to IoE. Additionally, we introduce a UAV-enabled IoE (Ue-IoE) solution by exploiting UAVs's mobility, in which we show that Ue-IoE can greatly enhance the scalability, intelligence and diversity of IoE. Finally, we outline the future directions in Ue-IoE.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure