Energy Efficient Event Localization and Classification for Nano IoT

Advancements in nanotechnology promises new capabilities for Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor extremely fine-grained events by deploying sensors as small as a few hundred nanometers. Researchers predict that such tiny sensors can transmit wireless data using graphene-based nano-antenna radiating in the terahertz band (0.1-10 THz). Powering such wireless communications with nanoscale energy supply, however, is a major challenge to overcome. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient event monitoring framework for nano IoT that enables nanosensors to update a remote base station about the location and type of the detected event using only a single short pulse. Nanosensors encode different events using different center frequencies with non overlapping half power bandwidth over the entire terahertz band. Using uniform linear array (ULA) antenna, the base station localizes the events by estimating the direction of arrival of the pulse and classifies them from the center frequency estimated by spectral centroid of the received signal. Simulation results confirm that, from a distance of 1 meter, a 6th derivative Gaussian pulse consuming only 1 atto Joule can achieve localization and classification accuracies of 1.58 degree and 98.8%, respectively.Comment: 6 pages, 18 Figures, accepted for publication in IEEE GLOBECOM Conference 201

Terahertz Characterisation of Living Plant Leaves for Quality of Life Assessment Applications

This paper presents preliminary results on employing Terahertz (THz) technology for measuring the water contents of leaves. The main purpose of this work is to highlight transmission constraints of terahertz radiation through the plants in the THz frequency region. Multiple leaves of plants are examined using the THz Swissto12 system, and the effect of thickness and water contents on transmission loss and attenuation are observed at different frequency regions, which can lead to meaningful information to study and analyse the existence of any pesticides in leaves with terahertz frequencies. The results of this paper pave the way for applicability of terahertz frequencies for sensing the quality of life in plants

A comprehensive survey on hybrid communication in context of molecular communication and terahertz communication for body-centric nanonetworks

With the huge advancement of nanotechnology over the past years, the devices are shrinking into micro-scale, even nano-scale. Additionally, the Internet of nano-things (IoNTs) are generally regarded as the ultimate formation of the current sensor networks and the development of nanonetworks would be of great help to its fulfilment, which would be ubiquitous with numerous applications in all domains of life. However, the communication between the devices in such nanonetworks is still an open problem. Body-centric nanonetworks are believed to play an essential role in the practical application of IoNTs. BCNNs are also considered as domain specific like wireless sensor networks and always deployed on purpose to support a particular application. In these networks, electromagnetic and molecular communications are widely considered as two main promising paradigms and both follow their own development process. In this survey, the recent developments of these two paradigms are first illustrated in the aspects of applications, network structures, modulation techniques, coding techniques and security to then investigate the potential of hybrid communication paradigms. Meanwhile, the enabling technologies have been presented to apprehend the state-of-art with the discussion on the possibility of the hybrid technologies. Additionally, the inter-connectivity of electromagnetic and molecular body-centric nanonetworks is discussed. Afterwards, the related security issues of the proposed networks are discussed. Finally, the challenges and open research directions are presented

Nano-Communication for Biomedical Applications: A Review on the State-of-the-Art From Physical Layers to Novel Networking Concepts

We review EM modeling of the human body, which is essential for in vivo wireless communication channel characterization; discuss EM wave propagation through human tissues; present the choice of operational frequencies based on current standards and examine their effects on communication system performance; discuss the challenges of in vivo antenna design, as the antenna is generally considered to be an integral part of the in vivo channel; review the propagation models for the in vivo wireless communication channel and discuss the main differences relative to the ex vivo channel; and address several open research problems and future research directions

Facilitating Internet of Things on the Edge

The evolution of electronics and wireless technologies has entered a new era, the Internet of Things (IoT). Presently, IoT technologies influence the global market, bringing benefits in many areas, including healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, and entertainment. Modern IoT devices serve as a thin client with data processing performed in a remote computing node, such as a cloud server or a mobile edge compute unit. These computing units own significant resources that allow prompt data processing. The user experience for such an approach relies drastically on the availability and quality of the internet connection. In this case, if the internet connection is unavailable, the resulting operations of IoT applications can be completely disrupted. It is worth noting that emerging IoT applications are even more throughput demanding and latency-sensitive which makes communication networks a practical bottleneck for the service provisioning. This thesis aims to eliminate the limitations of wireless access, via the improvement of connectivity and throughput between the devices on the edge, as well as their network identification, which is fundamentally important for IoT service management. The introduction begins with a discussion on the emerging IoT applications and their demands. Subsequent chapters introduce scenarios of interest, describe the proposed solutions and provide selected performance evaluation results. Specifically, we start with research on the use of degraded memory chips for network identification of IoT devices as an alternative to conventional methods, such as IMEI; these methods are not vulnerable to tampering and cloning. Further, we introduce our contributions for improving connectivity and throughput among IoT devices on the edge in a case where the mobile network infrastructure is limited or totally unavailable. Finally, we conclude the introduction with a summary of the results achieved