PhyNetLab: An IoT-Based Warehouse Testbed

Future warehouses will be made of modular embedded entities with communication ability and energy aware operation attached to the traditional materials handling and warehousing objects. This advancement is mainly to fulfill the flexibility and scalability needs of the emerging warehouses. However, it leads to a new layer of complexity during development and evaluation of such systems due to the multidisciplinarity in logistics, embedded systems, and wireless communications. Although each discipline provides theoretical approaches and simulations for these tasks, many issues are often discovered in a real deployment of the full system. In this paper we introduce PhyNetLab as a real scale warehouse testbed made of cyber physical objects (PhyNodes) developed for this type of application. The presented platform provides a possibility to check the industrial requirement of an IoT-based warehouse in addition to the typical wireless sensor networks tests. We describe the hardware and software components of the nodes in addition to the overall structure of the testbed. Finally, we will demonstrate the advantages of the testbed by evaluating the performance of the ETSI compliant radio channel access procedure for an IoT warehouse

Efficient multi-objective optimization of wireless network problems on wireless testbeds

A large amount of research focuses on experimentally optimizing performance of wireless solutions. Finding the optimal performance settings typically requires investigating all possible combinations of design parameters, while the number of required experiments increases exponentially for each considered design parameter. The aim of this paper is to analyze the applicability of global optimization techniques to reduce the optimization time of wireless experimentation. In particular, the paper applies the Efficient Global Optimization (EGO) algorithm implemented in the SUrrogate MOdeling (SUMO) toolbox inside a wireless testbed. The proposed techniques are implemented and evaluated in a wireless testbed using a realistic wireless conference network problem. The performance accuracy and experimentation time of an exhaustively searched experiment is compared against a SUMO optimized experiment. In our proof of concept, the proposed SUMO optimizer reaches 99.51% of the global optimum performance while requiring 10 times less experiments compared to the exhaustive search experiment

Smart city pilot projects using LoRa and IEEE802.15.4 technologies

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), through wireless communications and the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, are the enabling keys for transforming traditional cities into smart cities, since they provide the core infrastructure behind public utilities and services. However, to be effective, IoT-based services could require different technologies and network topologies, even when addressing the same urban scenario. In this paper, we highlight this aspect and present two smart city testbeds developed in Italy. The first one concerns a smart infrastructure for public lighting and relies on a heterogeneous network using the IEEE 802.15.4 short-range communication technology, whereas the second one addresses smart-building applications and is based on the LoRa low-rate, long-range communication technology. The smart lighting scenario is discussed providing the technical details and the economic benefits of a large-scale (around 3000 light poles) flexible and modular implementation of a public lighting infrastructure, while the smart-building testbed is investigated, through measurement campaigns and simulations, assessing the coverage and the performance of the LoRa technology in a real urban scenario. Results show that a proper parameter setting is needed to cover large urban areas while maintaining the airtime sufficiently low to keep packet losses at satisfactory levels

6G Radio Testbeds: Requirements, Trends, and Approaches

The proof of the pudding is in the eating - that is why 6G testbeds are essential in the progress towards the next generation of wireless networks. Theoretical research towards 6G wireless networks is proposing advanced technologies to serve new applications and drastically improve the energy performance of the network. Testbeds are indispensable to validate these new technologies under more realistic conditions. This paper clarifies the requirements for 6G radio testbeds, reveals trends, and introduces approaches towards their development