WiFIUS: Collaborative Research: Ambient Re-Scatter Inspired Machine Type Communication for Heterogeneous IoT Systems

物联网(IoT)具有潜在的好处和众多应用，从智能城市到辅助生活。预计物联网还将在未来十年产生数万亿美元的经济影响。物联网是一个由物理对象组成的网络，其连接需要低功耗、长电池寿命、低占空比和大量低成本设备。基于最近标准化的用于机器类型通信的窄带物联网(NB-IOT)技术，该方案的目标是在现有的NB-IOT通信系统中添加低成本的环境重散射(ARS)设备，这可以显著提高系统的整体容量，并且可以在NB-IOT和ARS系统之间共享多余的容量。因此，该项目能够以频谱和能源高效的方式将超低功耗设备集成到通信系统中。还提出了允许ARS设备彼此协作以及与其他网络协作的新颖方法和传输方案。该项目的成功将推动此类超低功耗物联网解决方案的发展。拟议研究工作的变革性和跨学科性质将促进对通信工程的了解，该项目的成果可能被行业用于网络开发并影响未来的行业标准化。该项目还将加强美国和芬兰在无线通信研究领域的合作。该项目的目标是通过四个协同推进，通过将新兴的机器类型通信系统与超低功耗ARS设备相结合，构建新的高效和安全的物联网连接解决方案，以增强物联网应用：(1)通信系统设计和基本性能分析，这将开发健壮的非相干方法，允许网络在传输数据的同时与ARS通信，开发用于在接收器联合接收网络和ARS数据的信号处理方法，并对具有ARS节点的信道进行基于射线跟踪的穷尽模拟，并应用结果来确定系统的可行操作点；(2)新的无线资源管理方案，利用匹配理论，在提出的具有ARS的NB-IoT中开发高性能、低复杂度、分散和实用的解决方案；(3)物联网部署的安全机制，考虑到所提出系统的物理和低成本性质，将涵盖MIMO后向散射的物理层安全和低成本的网络安全；(4)系统和协议开发，通过构建将LTE的NB-IoT版本与ARS相集成的测试床来验证系统设计的适用性。

Internet of Things (IoT) has potential benefits and numerous applications, ranging from smart cities to assisted living. IoT is also expected to have many trillion dollars economic impact in the next decade. IoT is a network of physical objects, whose connectivity requires low power consumption, long battery life, low duty cycle and massive number of low cost devices. Based on the recently standardized Narrowband IoT (NB-IOT) technique for machine type communications, the proposed scheme targets adding low cost Ambient Re-Scatter (ARS) devices to an existing NB-IOT communication system, which can significantly improve the overall system capacity and the excess capacity can be shared between the NB-IOT and ARS systems. Hence, this project enables to integrate ultra-low power devices to the communication systems in spectral and energy efficient manners. Novel methods and transmission schemes allowing ARS devices to collaborate with each other and with other networks are also proposed. The success of this project will boost such ultra-low power IoT solutions. The transformative and interdisciplinary nature of the proposed research work will advance the knowledge of communications engineering, and the outcomes of the project can potentially be used by industry for network development and impact future industrial standardizations. This project will also strengthen collaboration in the research field of wireless communications between the United States and Finland.This project targets enhancing IoT applications through constructing new efficient and secure IoT connectivity solutions by combining emerging machine type communication system with ultra-low power ARS devices via four synergistic thrusts: (1) communication system design and fundamental performance analysis, which will develop robust non-coherent methods that allow the network to communicate with ARS while transmitting data, develop signal processing methods for joint reception of network and ARS data at the receiver, and conduct exhaustive ray-tracing based simulations of the channel with ARS nodes and apply the results to identify feasible operation point for the system; (2) novel radio resource management schemes that exploit matching theory to develop high performance, low complexity, decentralized, and practical solutions in proposed NB-IoT with ARS; (3) security mechanisms for IoT deployment, which will cover both physical layer security in MIMO backscatter and low cost cyber security, considering the physical and low cost natures of the proposed system; (4) system and protocol development, which will demonstrate the applicability of the system design by building a test-bed that integrates the NB-IoT version of the LTE with ARS.