NeTS: Small: Fundamentals of Internet-of-Things with Energy Harvesting and Edge Intelligence

物联网（IoT）是一个由无线连接设备组成的庞大互联生态系统，从传统的计算设备到普通的物体。大多数物联网设备的低成本性质和有限的资源，加上系统的庞大规模，从根本上引入了新的设计限制。特别是，很大一部分物联网设备将部署在难以到达的地方，这使得频繁更换电池变得具有挑战性。一个吸引人的解决方案是允许物联网设备从环境源（如现有无线网络的射频（RF）信号）中获取自己的能量。为此，本研究的总体目标是开发一个基本框架，以解开大规模能量收集物联网系统的性能和操作限制。特别是，开发的框架将提供统一的方法来建模，分析和优化从拟议的原型物联网设备测试平台获得的现实操作约束下的能量收集物联网。这项研究还辅之以一项详细的教育计划，其中包括开发新课程，指导研究生和本科生在无线网络、能量收集和物联网交叉领域的研究。还计划在当地学校开展精心策划的外展活动，利用实际操作的物联网实验，针对代表性不足的少数民族。这项变革性研究将通过开发第一个综合框架来分析和优化能量收集约束下的物联网性能，为能量收集物联网奠定基础。该框架整合了来自无线网络、随机几何、博弈论、学习和设备实现的新思想，产生了以下基本创新：1)用于联合分析能量收集物联网系统的能量收集和通信方面的新空间模型和相关性能指标；2)用于能量收集物联网的能量约束和关联感知边缘智能技术；3)新颖的自组织资源管理机制，从博弈论中推进新思想，以捕获物联网设备之间的规模、动态和相互依赖性；在线算法，使每个物联网设备能够以完全自组织的方式找到其最佳的资源管理解决方案；5)设计和实现一种新型宽带射频能量收集模块，使用唤醒电路，仅在射频能量收集大于相应组件消耗的能量的频带上激活能量收集。总的来说，这些创新将为新型能量收集物联网奠定基础，以满足新兴的智慧城市服务。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a massive interconnected ecosystem of wireless connected devices ranging from traditional computing devices to mundane objects. The low-cost nature and limited resources of most IoT devices coupled with the sheer scale of the system introduce fundamentally new design constraints. In particular, a significant fraction of IoT devices will be deployed at hard-to-reach places which makes it challenging to replace their batteries frequently. One appealing solution to this is to allow IoT devices to harvest their own energy from ambient sources, such as the radio frequency (RF) signals of existing wireless networks. To this end, the overarching goal of this research is to develop a foundational framework that will unravel the performance and operational limits of a large-scale energy harvesting IoT system. In particular, the developed framework will provide a unified approach to the modeling, analysis, and optimization of an energy harvesting IoT under realistic operational constraints obtained from the proposed test-bed of prototype IoT devices. This research is complemented by an elaborate educational plan that includes development of new courses and mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students on research at the intersection of wireless networking, energy harvesting, and IoT. Elaborate outreach events leveraging hands-on IoT experiments targeting under-represented minorities at local schools are also planned. This transformative research will lay the foundations of an energy harvesting IoT by developing the first comprehensive framework for analyzing and optimizing IoT performance under energy harvesting constraints. This framework integrates novel ideas from wireless networking, stochastic geometry, game theory, learning, and device implementation, to yield the following fundamental innovations: 1) New spatial models and associated performance metrics for the joint analysis of energy harvesting and communication aspects of energy harvesting IoT systems, 2) Energy-constrained and correlation-aware edge-intelligence techniques for an energy harvesting IoT, 3) Novel, self-organizing resource management mechanisms that advance new ideas from game theory to capture the scale, dynamics, and inter-dependencies across IoT devices, 4) Real-time, online algorithms that enable each IoT device to find its optimal resource management solution in a fully self-organizing manner, and 5) Design and implementation of a novel wideband RF energy harvesting module using wake up circuits that will only activate energy harvesting on the bands where RF energy harvested is more than the energy dissipated by the corresponding components. Collectively, these innovations will lay the foundations of a new breed of energy-harvesting IoT that can cater to emerging smart city services.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.