WiFiUS: Collaborative Research: Low Overhead Wireless Access Solutions for Massive and Dynamic IoT Connectivity

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By wirelessly connecting billions of physical devices such as sensors, appliances, vehicles, machines, and wearable electronics, the ubiquitous connectivity to IoT (Internet of Things) will fundamentally change the way humans interact with one another and with the physical world. IoT technologies are poised to transform many critical sectors including health, energy, and transportation. On the other hand, the massive connectivity, uneven information payload, severe cost and power constraints, and diverse service needs of IoT applications also pose significant challenges to existing design principles of wireless systems. To address such challenges, this WiFiUS project aims to develop fundamentally new access protocols and transmission technologies specifically for the next-generation IoT-centric wireless applications, to achieve low-overhead and low-cost communications at high efficiency and low-latency. The success of the project will broadly benefit both wireless operators and equipment/device developers by addressing the timely and difficult challenge of effectively connecting massive number of IoT devices. The results of this project will be widely disseminated through tutorials, publications, exchanges with industry partners, and be incorporated into undergraduate and graduate education.Specifically, the project develops new IoT network frameworks, control algorithms and optimization tools to support high-performance and low-overhead connectivity for massive number of IoT devices with heterogeneous energy and latency requirements. Bringing together expertise spanning PHY/MAC-layers and signal processing as well as network-layer protocol design and optimization, the US-Finland team leverages two key innovations to unleash the potential of network-layer and physical-layer advances for IoT applications. First, the project targets the reduction of overhead and complexity (such as for channel access, scheduling, and beamforming) as a central investigative issue; and aims to unlock the vast efficiency gains of large scale multi-antenna coverage for IoT devices with low-overhead, low-cost, and low-power constraints. Second, the solutions will seamlessly integrate licensed and unlicensed bands, as well as stationary and mobile access points, in order to support the largest potential range of IoT applications with diverse QoS requirements. Integratively, the project will generate a novel and comprehensive set of solutions to support low-overhead and low-cost massive IoT connectivity, and to dynamically adapt to changing load- and traffic-patterns to deliver the required level of coverage and service quality.