IoT
To enable reliable IoT applications using battery-operated or energy harvesting devices with limited computational power and memory, different design tradeoffs have to be considered, both in hardware, communication and software implementations.
IDLab has a long-lasting expertise on IoT system design and prototyping, with a focus on following activities:
- Assessing, extending and improving state-of-the-art wireless IoT communication technologies that are suitable for resource constrained devices. These activities include the design of resource allocation protocols, improving resilience and robustness of communication and decreasing the energy consumption. Both short-range (IEEE 802.15.4, Bluetooth® Low Energy, Bluetooth® Mesh, UWB) and long-range (IEEE 802.11ah, IEEE 802.15.4g, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT) wireless technologies are being considered. Also, multi-technology solutions (e.g. UWB+BLE) and the co-design of communication and localization are considered.
- Assessing, extending and improving protocol stacks suitable for constrained devices and single-hop/multi-hop networks, with a particular focus on standards emerged/emerging from IETF (RPL, 6LoWPAN, SCHC, CoAP, OSCORE, etc.). The roll-out, commissioning and management of such devices is taken into consideration, along with their energy consumption. Also, novel network monitoring and management approaches are studied such as the use of in-band telemetry or Digital Twin Networks (DTN).
- Studying complete end-to-end IoT systems - spanning data capturing, transmission and processing – for various application domains and use cases such as health monitoring, audio streaming (LE Audio), animal monitoring, etc. This also includes machine learning based data processing on constrained sensor devices, edge and cloud.
- Testing and validation of IoT systems is performed using IDLab’s extensive wireless testing facilities, possibly complemented with simulation. Both residential and industrial environments are considered.
