NeTS: Medium: Connecting the Next Billion: Rethinking Wireless Network Design Principles for the Internet-of-Everything

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Within the next decade, billions of devices are expected to be connected to the Internet wirelessly to enable applications like smart homes, body/health monitoring, and environmental monitoring, among many others. This vast Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be active in the hundreds of devices within a small environment and that send intermittent, but timely data. Existing wireless technologies are unsuitable for managing IoT application since they are designed to handle devices such as smartphones that are not very dense in space and exchange huge amounts of data when they access wireless medium. The research objective of this proposal is to answer the need for a new IoT architecture encompassing all layers from Physical and Medium Access Control to Networking. Proposed design utilizes the unique characteristics (e.g., intermittence, high density, and user dynamics) of IoT applications to achieve an "interference-averaging" phenomenon that provides the foundation for more reliable and rapid service guarantees. This approach is well-suited to IoT applications since its transmissions are immediate, reliable, and works efficiently under dense deployments. This project is expected to be a key enabler for low-cost public access to critical wireless services in environmental monitoring, healthcare, and smart-living. By 2020, there will be anywhere between an estimated 25-75 billion devices that will connect to the Internet, making up the so-called vast Internet-of-Things (IoT). Many of the IoT applications will be based on a large population of low-cost devices dynamically making connections with access points or neighboring devices to communicate small bundles of delay-sensitive data. This contrasts sharply with the typical wireless local area network (WLAN) setup with intense traffic generated by relatively sparsely positioned stations. Accordingly, the existing wireless resource allocation technologies are not well-suited to serve the upcoming IoT network. Therefore, there is a pressing need for the development of efficient and practical communication strategies to support a large number of densely-packed mobile devices generating intermittent and delay-sensitive traffic - a scenario of increasing significance in the emerging IoT-device networks. This research addresses this need by undertaking the well-founded development of a framework for establishing the foundations and the means necessary for the principled development of "light-weight" communication and networking strategies that provide low-complexity and low-overhead solutions for the provably efficient operation of emerging IoT networks. To that end, this research proposes an interference-embracing paradigm to accommodate the above non-traditional dynamics of upcoming IoT applications. Proposed strategy allows many users to share the resources simultaneously, thereby bypassing the heavy costs of existing wireless solutions. The approach is novel in that: (i) the physical and network layer operation accounts for the fast user and intermittent traffic dynamics and the diverse quality-of-service requirements, as well as their impact on the observed interference by a typical user; (ii) the multi-user access design combines the strengths of collision-avoiding and collision-embracing paradigms; (iii) the overhead load is minimized by reducing or eliminating the signaling requirements for practical real-world implementation; and (iv) it is supported by a strong experimentation component with the ultimate objective of instantiating novel theoretically optimal techniques in practical IoT applications. The attainment of these objectives requires the development of new tools in such diverse areas as code design, resource allocation, distributed algorithm design, and implementation. The cross-disciplinary research proposed in this project will help fill the gap in our understanding on how large scale networks can effectively manage the emerging device and traffic dynamics. The new approaches and techniques are in turn expected to make fundamental contributions to the individual disciplines themselves. Also, the project will help provide participating students a balanced exposure to a wide variety of theoretical and applied techniques spanning different fields including wireless networking, optimization, algorithm design, and wireless systems implementation, and thereby contribute to the education of a competent workforce.