Towards Massive Connectivity of Wireless IoT in Evolving 5G Cellular Network and Beyond

物联网(IoT)正在成为信息革命的下一个阶段。它具有改变世界的潜力，因为它能够通过智能家居、智能城市、定位、安全、跟踪、车辆连接和电子健康等多种应用来彻底改变我们的生活。根据最近的一项预测，国际数据公司(IDC)预计，到2020年底，全球将有2120亿物联网。ABI研究公司最近的一份报告预测，从今天到本世纪末，无线连接增长的75%将来自传感器节点和附件。 物联网设备通常是各种低功耗、低成本、支持软件的设备，物联网应用场景从低带宽延迟容忍应用到高带宽延迟敏感应用。这种多样化的情况显然会导致各种具有挑战性的可扩展性、异构性和服务质量(Qos)问题。通信网络的能源效率也变得越来越重要，因为全球电力消耗、成本和对环境的影响将随着通信量的增长而成比例地增长，如果不是指数级的话。一些物联网设备可能不是由传统电源供电，而是可以依靠能量收集来延长其寿命。为了确保不同物联网设备在密集流量负载场景中的无缝连接和彻底的灵活性，还可以在现有的多层架构中考虑无人机辅助通信。 近年来，设计下一代蜂窝网络体系结构的研究和开发正在取得进展，以支持无线物联网。其他的研究和开发集中在“应用及以上”的网络层问题上。然而，在端到端系统中，这些可能不足以实现物联网的全部潜力。因此，我们需要积极主动，根据物联网通信的特定性质来解决物理和介质接入层设计问题。 我们研究计划的长期目标是开发能够在5G蜂窝网络及更远的地方无缝覆盖海量物联网设备的新技术。为了实现无线物联网设备的大规模连接，我的研究计划的方法是在通信协议栈中设计创新技术。我们研究计划的长期目标将通过以下短期目标来实现：开发用于海量连接的无线资源管理算法，以及节能和低复杂性的发射器/接收器对。

The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as the next stage of the information revolution. It has the potential to transform the world as it is capable of revolutionizing our lives through manifold applications e.g., smart homes, smart cities, positioning, security, tracking, vehicular connectivity, and e-health. According to a recent forecast, International Data Corporation (IDC) expects 212 billion connected “things” globally by the end of 2020. A recent report from ABI research predicts that 75 percent of the growth in wireless connections between today and the end of the decade will come from sensor nodes and accessories. The IoT devices are usually a wide range of low-power, low-cost, software-enabled devices and IoT application scenarios range from low-band-width delay-tolerant to high-band-width delay-sensitive applications. Such a diverse situation will obviously lead to various challenging scalability, heterogeneity and quality-of-service (QoS) issues. Energy efficiency of the communication networks is also becoming more and more critical since the global power consumption, its costs, and environmental effects will increase proportionally, if not exponentially, along with the traffic growth. Some IoT devices may not be powered by traditional power sources rather can rely on energy harvesting to prolong their lifetime. To ensure seamless connectivity and radical flexibility of diverse IoT devices in dense traffic load scenarios, drone-assisted communication may also be considered within the existing multi-tier architecture. In recent years, research and development in designing next generation cellular network architectures are making progress to support wireless IoT. Other research and development have focused on “application and above” network layer issues. However, in an end-to-end system, these may not be enough to accomplish the full potential of IoT. Consequently, we need to be proactive in order to address physical and medium access layer design issues, tailored to the specific nature of IoT communications. The long-term objective of our research program is to develop novel technologies that can provide seamless coverage of massive IoT devices in 5G cellular network and beyond. In aiming for massive connectivity of wireless IoT devices, the approach of my research program is to design innovative techniques in the communication protocol stack. The long-term objective of our research program will be achieved through the following short-term objectives: Development of radio resource management algorithms for massive connectivity, and Energy-efficient and low-complex transmitter/receiver pair.