NeTS: Small: Functional Fabric Devices and Architectures for the Internet of Things

Drexel University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Functional fabrics are textiles designed to perform a wide variety of functions with applications ranging from medicine and sports to realizing the potential of textile-based smart devices (e.g., clothing, drapes, upholstery) as sensor networks within the Internet of Things (IoT). One particularly compelling application of functional fabrics is in the area of wearables for the IoT, which are becoming ubiquitous. Coupled with pervasive access to smart phones and wireless Internet, they are enabling exciting new application domains, notably in smart homes and wearable health systems. The next generation of wearables for the Internet of Things are likely to be fully integrated into textiles, turning the fabric into garment and textile devices. The applications that functional fabrics will enable, leveraging the networking technologies that will be developed in this proposal, will vary widely between what will one day be seen as: mundane (e.g., smart drapes with sensors that measure and regulate temperature within a room), convenient (e.g., smart laundry that will help prevent bright colored clothing from being washed with whites), personal / professional productivity (e.g., convergence of functional fabrics with voice and data transceivers for social / work applications), as well as life-changing/saving (e.g., biomedical functional fabrics with textile based sensors and soft robotic actuators for collecting data, enabling seamless telemedicine, and remote actuated treatments). The use of passive radio frequency identification (RFID), in particular, is an enabling technology for high density deployments since each functional fabric device would not require a battery or cumbersome transceiver electronics. We will use a balanced approach between theory and implementation, to develop architectures for passive RFID-based functional fabrics and associated sensor solutions. The density of functional fabrics will be much larger than conventional RFID networks, requiring a coordinated network of cognitive RFID interrogators that use spatial and spectral degrees of freedom to isolate individual devices. Passive RFID sensor devices provide pseudo-periodic connectivity with IoT services and provide the ability to sample and report the physical surroundings independently from supporting infrastructure. Message concentration protocols for this supporting infrastructure will be considered. Enabling these networks will require challenging assumptions that have been made regarding physical layer (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layer design for RFID architectures, and we will leverage a combination of network modeling along with prototyping on a flexible software defined radio (SDR) to propose new IoT architectures and protocols. 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.