NeTS: Small: Collaborative Research: Towards Scalable and Energy Efficient Cellular IoT Communication

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With smart sensing devices becoming a ubiquitous part of our connected world, the need to support large-scale communication involving Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices is becoming a reality. IoT traffic needs to be carried over cellular networks as it is the primary wide-area wireless communication infrastructure. However, the current 3GPP architecture and protocols are inefficient and difficult to scale, even if a small fraction of all IoT devices are mobile and have to be addressable/reachable through the Internet. In addition, link layer operations, traffic scheduling, and transport protocols currently in use are not well suited for typical short, periodic and bursty IoT communication patterns. This project aims to address these limitations by re-designing core operations and protocols involved in IoT data communication over cellular networks. The issues that the project will address are not only central to the efficient operation of current 3G/4G and future 5G networks, but must be solved to make the grand vision of the Internet-of-Things a reality. Through participation by industrial partners, the team will maximize the relevance and outreach of research to practice. The PIs will involve undergraduate students in their research, and integrate findings from this research into graduate courses, and encourage participation of under-represented students.Addressing the limitations of IoT data communication over cellular networks is challenging, as it requires supporting stringent requirements on limited capability (such as low power) end-systems, and maintaining only small amounts of state in the cellular network on a per-device basis. To address these challenges, the project will investigate novel mechanisms to eliminate cellular network tunnels by leveraging the locality of typical IoT mobility patterns and the capabilities of protocols that separate location-from-identity. Second, the project will investigate cross-layer mechanisms for adaptive optimization of Radio Resource Control (RRC) configurations towards attaining an ideal balance between end-device energy efficiency and information exchange overhead in the network. Third, the project will investigate new mechanisms for efficient traffic scheduling over the air-interface. Finally, the project plans to design a new transport that can dynamically adapt based on IoT application requirements, and is flexible enough to effectively handle the varying size of data transfers. The solutions will take into account the specific properties in IoT communication.