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.
