Wireless Connectivity Fabric for Internet of Things

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Today's society is increasingly dependent on the digital platform. In a networked society, everything will become connected wherever connectivity provides added value. Not only humans are connected by Internet, but also billions of physical devices are inter-networked and interacting with one another by collecting and exchanging data, forming the Internet of Things (IoT). Ericsson forecasts that there will be 18 billion IoT devices by 2022, and IoT is expected to transform almost every vertical industry: transportation and logistics, healthcare, energy, agriculture, automobile, cities and infrastructure, public safety and security, consumer applications, etc. A scalable, efficient and pervasive connectivity fabric is needed to link billions of devices, part of which will heavily rely on innovative wireless technologies. Various IoT applications have diverse requirements on communications infrastructure in terms of data rate, latency, power consumption, coverage, mobility and cost. On one end of the spectrum, mission critical applications need high reliability and extremely low latency, with some use cases incurring a large volume of data to be supported by high data rate transmission. This is referred to as critical IoT. On the other side of the spectrum a massive number of IoT applications have very small amount of data for transmission, run on battery power for years with low cost. This is called massive IoT. Between the two extremes there are a variety of different application requirements. This phenomenon presents significant design challenges and there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. For service providers, it is important to offer heterogeneous connectivity services in which the connectivity services are largely transparent to the developers and end users.***In this proposal, the generic IoT system architecture is comprised of three domains: the capillary connectivity domain, the wide area connectivity domain and the data domain. The proposed research program will focus on several key enabling wireless communication technologies with potentially high impact: 1) Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna systems; 2) Spectrum sharing and aggregation; 3) Energy harvesting in capillary edge networks; 4) Security. These objectives cover key technologies for high data rate wide area connectivity domain and low power capillary connectivity domain. Successful completion of the proposed research will provide both theoretical and practical guidance to commercial IoT product development, shape the way IoT systems and networks are built, and help to form industry standards. The intellectual property generated will be the basis for future development of vast wireless IoT applications transforming existing vertical industries, increasing the competitiveness of Canadian business and employment opportunities, and improving people's quality of life.