Recent study predicts that by 2020 up to 50 billion IoT devices will be connected to the Internet, straining the capacity of wireless network that has already been overloaded with data-hungry mobile applications, such as high-definition video streaming and virtual reality(VR)/augmented reality(AR). How to accommodate the demand for both massive scale of IoT devices and high-speed cellular services in the physically limited spectrum without significantly increasing the operational and infrastructure costs is one of the main challenges for operators. In this article, we introduce a new multi-operator network sharing framework that supports the coexistence of IoT and high-speed cellular services. Our framework is based on the radio access network (RAN) sharing architecture recently introduced by 3GPP as a promising solution for operators to improve their resource utilization and reduce the system roll-out cost. We evaluate the performance of our proposed framework using the real base station location data in the city of Dublin collected from two major operators in Ireland. Numerical results show that our proposed framework can almost double the total number of IoT devices that can be supported and coexist with other cellular services compared with the case without network sharing.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a promising paradigm to accommodate massive device connections in 5G and beyond. To pave the way for future IoT, the spectrum should be planed in advance. Spectrum sharing is a preferable solution for IoT due to the scarcity of available spectrum resource. In particular, mobile operators are inclined to exploit the existing standards and infrastructures of current cellular networks and deploy IoT within licensed cellular spectrum. Yet, proprietary companies prefer to deploy IoT within unlicensed spectrum to avoid any licence fee. In this paper, we provide a surv…
The unlicensed spectrum, although free, has become an invaluable resource toward enabling massive Internet-of-things (IoT) applications, where Internet-enabled devices are deployed at a large scale. However, realizing massive IoT connectivity over unlicensed bands requires efficient spectrum sharing among IoT devices and fair coexistence with other wireless networks. In this article, we discuss several spectrum sharing methods to address these intra- and inter-network sharing issues. To this end, we first consider ALOHA-based networks that avoid spectrum sensing, yet rely on diversity to impro…
Massive MIMO is considered to be one of the key technologies in the emerging 5G systems, but also a concept applicable to other wireless systems. Exploiting the large number of degrees of freedom (DoFs) of massive MIMO essential for achieving high spectral efficiency, high data rates and extreme spatial multiplexing of densely distributed users. On the one hand, the benefits of applying massive MIMO for broadband communication are well known and there has been a large body of research on designing communication schemes to support high rates. On the other hand, using massive MIMO for Internet-o…
With the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) era, the ever-increasing number of devices and emerging applications have triggered the need for ubiquitous connectivity and more efficient computing paradigms. These stringent demands have posed significant challenges to the current wireless networks and their computing architectures. In this article, we propose a high-altitude platform (HAP) network-enabled edge computing paradigm to tackle the key issues of massive IoT connectivity. Specifically, we first provide a comprehensive overview of the recent advances in non-terrestrial network-based …
We investigate the activity detection and channel estimation issues for cell-free Internet of Things (IoT) networks with massive random access. In each time slot, only partial devices are active and communicate with neighboring access points (APs) using non-orthogonal random pilot sequences. Different from the centralized processing in cellular networks, the activity detection and channel estimation in cell-free IoT is more challenging due to the distributed and user-centric architecture. We propose a two-stage approach to detect the random activities of devices and estimate their channel stat…
Data is central to the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Most of the current IoT systems are using centralized cloud-based data sharing systems, which will be difficult to scale up to meet the demands of future IoT systems. Involvement of such third-party service provider requires also trust from both sensor owner and sensor data user. Moreover, the fees need to be paid for their services. To tackle both the scalability and trust issues and to automatize the payments, this paper presents a blockchain based proxy re-encryption scheme. The system stores the IoT data in a distributed cloud afte…
As the most well-known application of the Internet of Things (IoT), remote monitoring is now pervasive. In these monitoring applications, information usually has a higher value when it is fresher. A new metric, termed the age of information (AoI), has recently been proposed to quantify the information freshness in various IoT applications. This paper concentrates on the design and analysis of age-oriented random access for massive IoT networks. Specifically, we devise a new stationary threshold-based age-dependent random access (ADRA) protocol, in which each IoT device accesses the channel wit…
Wireless data aggregation (WDA), referring to aggregating data distributed at devices (e.g., sensors and smartphone), is a common operation in 5G-and-beyond machine-type communications to support Internet-of-Things (IoT), which lays the foundation for diversified applications such as distributed sensing, learning, and control. Conventional WDA techniques that are designed based on a separated-communication-and-computation principle encounter difficulty in accommodating the massive access under the limited radio resource and stringent latency constraints imposed by emerging applications (e.g, a…
Code-expanded Random Access (CeRA) is a promising technique for supporting mMTC in cellular IoT networks. However, its potentiality is limited by code ambiguity, which results from the inference of a larger number of codewords than those actually transmitted. In this letter, we propose a random access scheme to alleviate this problem by allowing devices to select the preambles to be transmitted considering a q-ary code with maximum average distance. Moreover, a CeRA decoding approach based on hypergraphs is proposed and an analytical model is derived. Numerical results show that the proposed s…
Cloud computing provides great benefits for applications hosted on the Web that also have special computational and storage requirements. This paper proposes an extensible and flexible architecture for integrating Wireless Sensor Networks with the Cloud. We have used REST based Web services as an interoperable application layer that can be directly integrated into other application domains for remote monitoring such as e-health care services, smart homes, or even vehicular area networks (VAN). For proof of concept, we have implemented a REST based Web services on an IP based low power WSN test…
The Internet of Things (IoT) can be conveniently deployed while empowering various applications, where the IoT nodes can form clusters to finish certain missions collectively. In this paper, we propose to employ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to assist the clustered IoT data collection with blockchain-based security provisioning. In particular, the UAVs generate candidate blocks based on the collected data, which are then audited through a lightweight proof-of-stake consensus mechanism within the UAV-based blockchain network. To motivate efficient blockchain while reducing the operational cos…
Massive Internet of Things (IoT) is foreseen to introduce plethora of applications for a fully connected world. Heterogeneous traffic is envisaged, where packets generated at each IoT device should be differentiated and served according to their priority. This paper develops a novel priority-aware spatiotemporal mathematical model to characterize massive IoT networks with uplink prioritized multistream traffic (PMT). Particularly, stochastic geometry is utilized to account for the macroscopic network wide mutual interference between the coexisting IoT devices. Discrete time Markov chains (DTMC…
Future wireless networks are envisioned to serve massive Internet of things (mIoT) via some radio access technologies, where the random access channel (RACH) procedure should be exploited for IoT devices to access the networks. However, the theoretical analysis of the RACH procedure for massive IoT devices is challenging. To address this challenge, we first correlate the RACH request of an IoT device with the status of its maintained queue and analyze the evolution of the queue status. Based on the analysis result, we then derive the closed-form expression of the random access (RA) success pro…
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) opens up a challenging research area towards improving secure data sharing which currently has several limitations. Primarily, the lack of inbuilt guarantees of honest behavior of participating, such as end-users or cloud behaving maliciously may result in disputes. Given such challenges, we propose a fair, accountable, and secure data sharing scheme, $\textit{FairShare}$ for IIoT. In this scheme, data collected from IoT devices are processed and stored in cloud servers with intermediate fog nodes facilitating computation. Authorized clients can access this…
Internet of Things (IoT) application deployment requires the allocation of resources such as virtual machines, storage, and network elements that must be deployed over distinct infrastructures such as cloud computing, Cloud of Things (CoT), datacenters and backbone networks. For massive IoT data acquisition, a gateway-based data aggregation approach is commonly used featuring sensor/ actuator seamless access and providing cache/ buffering and preprocessing functionality. In this perspective , gateways acting as producers need to allocate network resources to send IoT data to consumers. In this…
One of the central problems in massive Internet of Things (IoT) deployments is the monitoring of the status of a massive number of links. The problem is aggravated by the irregularity of the traffic transmitted over the link, as the traffic intermittency can be disguised as a link failure and vice versa. In this work we present a traffic model for IoT devices running quasi-periodic applications and we present both supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods for monitoring the network performance of IoT deployments with quasi-periodic reporting, such as smart-metering, environmental mo…
In this paper, we study the coexistence of critical and non-critical Internet of Things (IoT) services on a grant-free channel consisting of radio access and backhaul segments. On the radio access segment, IoT devices send packets to access points (APs) over an erasure collision channel using the slotted ALOHA protocol. Then, the APs forward correctly received messages to a base station (BS) over a shared wireless backhaul segment, modeled as an erasure collision channel. The APs hence play the role of uncoordinated relays that provide space diversity and may reduce performance losses caused b…
Massive connectivity for Internet of Things applications is expected to challenge the way access reservation protocols are designed in 5G networks. Since the number of devices and their density are envisioned to be orders of magnitude larger, state-of-the-art access reservation, Random Access (RA) procedure, might be a bottleneck for end-to-end delay. This would be especially challenging for burst arrival scenarios: Semi-synchronous triggering of a large number of devices due to a common event (blackout, emergency alarm, etc.). In this article, to improve RA procedure scalability, we propose t…
Salvador University (UNIFACS)（萨尔瓦多大学（UNIFACS））；University of Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）
Sensors are being extensively deployed and are expected to expand at significant rates in the coming years. They typically generate a large volume of data on the internet of things (IoT) application areas like smart cities, intelligent traffic systems, smart grid, and e-health. Cloud, edge and fog computing are potential and competitive strategies for collecting, processing, and distributing IoT data. However, cloud, edge, and fog-based solutions need to tackle the distribution of a high volume of IoT data efficiently through constrained and limited resource network infrastructures. This paper…
Large-scale deployments of massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) involve several challenges on cellular networks. To address the challenges of mMTC, or more generally, Internet of Things (IoT), the 3rd Generation Partnership Project has developed NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) as part of Release 13. NB-IoT is designed to provide better indoor coverage, support of a massive number of low-throughput devices, with relaxed delay requirements, and lower-energy consumption. NB-IoT reuses Long Term Evolution functionality with simplifications and optimizations. Particularly for small data transmissions…
With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), this means recognizing the need for architectures to handle billions of devices and their interactions. A virtual world engine at the massively multiplayer scale is a massively multiplayer online world (MMOW); one thing virtual world engines realized when going into the scale of MMOs, is the cost of maintaining a potentially quadratic number of interactions between a massive number of objects, laid out in a spatial dimension. Research into IoT was fueled by research in wireless sensor networks, but rather than start from a device perspective, this…
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are playing a major role in building security and trust in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. However, IoT deployments with a large number of devices, such as in environment monitoring applications, generate and send massive amounts of data. This would generate vast number of transactions that must be processed within the distributed ledger. In this work, we first demonstrate that the Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain fails to scale in a sizable IoT connectivity infrastructure. To solve this problem, we present a lightweight distributed ledger scheme to integ…
Tomorrow's massive-scale IoT sensor networks are poised to drive uplink traffic demand, especially in areas of dense deployment. To meet this demand, however, network designers leverage tools that often require accurate estimates of Channel State Information (CSI), which incurs a high overhead and thus reduces network throughput. Furthermore, the overhead generally scales with the number of clients, and so is of special concern in such massive IoT sensor networks. While prior work has used transmissions over one frequency band to predict the channel of another frequency band on the same link, …
The vision for smart city imperiously appeals to the implementation of Internet-of-Things (IoT), some features of which, such as massive access and bursty short packet transmissions, require new methods to enable the cellular system to seamlessly support its integration. Rigorous theoretical analysis is indispensable to obtain constructive insight for the networking design of massive access. In this paper, we propose and define the notion of massive and sporadic access (MSA) to quantitatively describe the massive access of IoT devices. We evaluate the temporal correlation of interference and s…
Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new cellular technology introduced in 3GPP Release 13 for providing wide-area coverage for the Internet of Things (IoT). This article provides an overview of the air interface of NB-IoT. We describe how NB-IoT addresses key IoT requirements such as deployment flexibility, low device complexity, long battery life time, support of massive number of devices in a cell, and significant coverage extension beyond existing cellular technologies. We also share the various design rationales during the standardization of NB-IoT in Release 13 and point out sever…
Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC), University of Oulu（奥卢大学无线通信中心）
The current random access (RA) allocation techniques suffer from congestion and high signaling overhead while serving massive machine type communication (mMTC) applications. To this end, 3GPP introduced the need to use fast uplink grant (FUG) allocation in order to reduce latency and increase reliability for smart internet-of-things (IoT) applications with strict QoS constraints. We propose a novel FUG allocation based on support vector machine (SVM), First, MTC devices are prioritized using SVM classifier. Second, LSTM architecture is used for traffic prediction and correction techniques to o…
Autonomy of devices is a major challenge in many Internet of Things (IoT) applications, in particular when the nodes are deployed remotely or difficult to assess places. In this paper we present an approach to provide energy to these devices by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Therefore, the two major challenges, finding and charging the node are presented. We propose a model to give the energy constrained node an unlimited autonomy by taken the Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) link and battery capacity into account. Selecting the most suitable battery technology allows a reduction in battery cap…
Recent advances on wireless energy transfer (WET) make it a promising solution for powering future Internet of Things (IoT) devices enabled by the upcoming sixth generation (6G) era. The main architectures, challenges and techniques for efficient and scalable wireless powering are overviewed in this paper. Candidates enablers such as energy beamforming (EB), distributed antenna systems (DAS), advances on devices' hardware and programmable medium, new spectrum opportunities, resource scheduling and distributed ledger technology are outlined. Special emphasis is placed on discussing the suitabil…
Mission critical data dissemination in massive Internet of things (IoT) networks imposes constraints on the message transfer delay between devices. Due to low power and communication range of IoT devices, data is foreseen to be relayed over multiple device-to-device (D2D) links before reaching the destination. The coexistence of a massive number of IoT devices poses a challenge in maximizing the successful transmission capacity of the overall network alongside reducing the multi-hop transmission delay in order to support mission critical applications. There is a delicate interplay between the …
Crowdsourcing wireless energy services is a novel convenient alternative to charge IoT devices. We demonstrate peer-to-peer wireless energy services sharing between smartphones over a distance. Our demo leverages (1) a service-based technique to share energy services, (2) state-of-the-art power transfer technology over a distance, and (3) a mobile application to enable communication between energy providers and consumers. In addition, our application monitors the charging process between IoT devices to collect a dataset for further analysis. Moreover, in this demo, we compare the peer-to-peer …
Besides enabling an enhanced mobile broadband, next generation of mobile networks (5G) are envisioned for the support of massive connectivity of heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT)s. These IoTs are envisioned for a large number of use-cases including smart cities, environment monitoring, smart vehicles, etc. Unfortunately, most IoTs have very limited computing and storage capabilities and need cloud services. Hence, connecting these devices through 5G systems requires huge spectrum resources in addition to handling the massive connectivity and improved security. This article discusses the c…
Technology advancements on sensing, communications, and computing directly accelerate the recent development of Internet of Things (IoT), leading to rich and diverse applications in industry and business processes. For enabling IoT applications, smart devices and networks rely on the capabilities for information collection, processing and tight collaboration with their neighbors. However, the rapid proliferation of IoT devices and real-time IoT applications result in dramatically increased demand for communication and computing resources, posing a significant challenge for the underlying resou…
Internet of Things is one of the most promising technology of the fifth-generation (5G) mobile broadband systems. Data-driven wireless services of 5G systems require unprecedented capacity and availability. The millimeter-wave based wireless communication technologies are expected to play an essential role in future 5G systems. In this article, we describe the three broad categories of fifth-generation services, viz., enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable and low-latency communications, and massive machine-type communications. Furthermore, we introduce the potential issues of consumer devi…
This paper studies the problem of massive Internet of things (IoT) access in beyond fifth generation (B5G) networks using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique. The problem involves massive IoT devices grouping and power allocation in order to respect the low latency as well as the limited operating energy of the IoT devices. The considered objective function, maximizing the number of successfully received IoT packets, is different from the classical sum-rate-related objective functions. The problem is first divided into multiple NOMA grouping subproblems. Then, using competitive ana…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a crucial component of Industry 4.0. Due to growing demands of customers, the current IoT architecture will not be reliable and responsive for next generation IoT applications and upcoming services. In this paper, the next generation IoT architecture based on new technologies is proposed in which the requirements of future applications, services, and generated data are addressed. Particularly, this architecture consists of Nano-chip, millimeter Wave (mmWave), Heterogeneous Networks (HetNet), device-todevice (D2D) communication, 5G-IoT, Machine-Type Communication…
With the emergence of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and ever-increasing demand for the newly connected devices, there is a need for more effective storage and processing paradigms to cope with the data generated from these devices. In this study, we have discussed different paradigms for data processing and storage including Cloud, Fog, and Edge computing models and their suitability in integrating with the IoT. Moreover, a detailed discussion on low latency and massive connectivity requirements of future cellular networks in accordance with machine-type communication (MTC) is also presented. Furth…
Cellular-based networks are expected to offer connectivity for massive Internet of Things (mIoT) systems. However, their Random Access CHannel (RACH) procedure suffers from unreliability, due to the collision from the simultaneous massive access. Despite that this collision problem has been treated in existing RACH schemes, these schemes usually organize IoT devices' transmission and re-transmission along with fixed parameters, thus can hardly adapt to time-varying traffic patterns. Without adaptation, the RACH procedure easily suffers from high access delay, high energy consumption, or even a…
University of Science and Technology (UST)（科学技术大学）；Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)（蔚山国立科学技术院）；Yonsei University（延世大学）；Pohang University of Science and Technology（浦项科技大学）；Hankyong National University（韩京国立大学）
Massive Internet of Things (IoT) networks have a wide range of applications, including but not limited to the rapid delivery of emergency and disaster messages. Although various benchmark algorithms have been developed to date for message delivery in such applications, they pose several practical challenges such as insufficient network coverage and/or highly redundant transmissions to expand the coverage area, resulting in considerable energy consumption for each IoT device. To overcome this problem, we first characterize a new performance metric, forwarding efficiency, which is defined as the…
Massive MIMO is a leading technology to connect very large numbers of energy constrained nodes, as it offers both extensive spatial multiplexing and large array gain. A challenge resides in partitioning the many nodes into groups that can communicate simultaneously such that the mutual interference is minimized. We here propose node partitioning strategies that do not require full channel state information, but rather are based on nodes' respective directional channel properties. In our considered scenarios, these typically have a time constant that is far larger than the coherence time of the…
Massive machine type communications (mMTC) is one of the cornerstone services that have to be supported by 5G systems. 3GPP has already introduced LTE-M and NB-IoT, often referred to as cellular IoT, in 3GPP Releases 13, 14, and 15 and submitted these technologies as part of 3GPP IMT-2020 (i.e., 5G) technology submission to ITU-R. Even though NB-IoT and LTE-M have shown to satisfy 5G mMTC requirements defined by ITU-R, it is expected that these cellular IoT solutions will not address all aspects of IoT and ongoing digitalization, including the support for direct communication between "things" …
Recently, the security of Internet of Things (IoT) has been an issue of great concern. Physical layer security methods can help IoT networks achieve information-theoretical secrecy. Nevertheless, utilizing physical security methods, such as artificial noise (AN) may cost extra power, which leads to low secure energy efficiency. In this paper, the hybrid precoding technique is employed to improve the secure energy efficiency of the IoT network. A secure energy efficiency optimization problem is formulated for the IoT network. Due to the non-convexity of the problem and the feasible domain, the …
The Internet of Things (IOT) sensor network is an effective solution for monitoring environment condition. IOT sensor network generates massive data, and the abilities of massive data storage, processing and query become technical challenges. To solve the problem, a Hadoop cloud platform is proposed. With the help of time and workload genetic algorithm (TWLGA), the data processing platform provides the work of one node to share with others, which not only raises efficiency of one single node, but also provides the compatibility support to reduce the possible risk of software and hardware. In t…
This paper introduces the Virtual Sensor Middleware (VSM), which facilitates distributed sensor data processing on multiple fog nodes. VSM uses a Virtual Sensor as the core component of the middleware. The virtual sensor concept is redesigned to support functionality beyond sensor/device virtualization, such as deploying a set of virtual sensors to represent an IoT application and distributed sensor data processing across multiple fog nodes. Furthermore, the virtual sensor deals with the heterogeneous nature of IoT devices and the various communication protocols using different adapters to com…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to generate large amounts of heterogeneous data from diverse sources including physical sensors, user devices, and social media platforms. Over the last few years, significant attention has been focused on personal data, particularly data generated by smart wearable and smart home devices. Making personal data available for access and trade is expected to become a part of the data driven digital economy. In this position paper, we review the research challenges in building personal Databoxes that hold personal data and enable data access by other partie…
The introduction of Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) as a cellular IoT technology aims to support massive Machine-Type Communications applications. These applications are characterized by massive connections from a large number of low-complexity and low-power devices. One of the goals of NB-IoT is to improve coverage extension beyond existing cellular technologies. In order to do that, NB-IoT introduces transmission repetitions and different bandwidth allocation configurations in uplink. These new transmission approaches yield many transmission options in uplink. In this paper, we propos…
The efficient deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) over cellular networks, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) or the next generation 5G, entails several challenges. For massive IoT, reducing the energy consumption on the device side becomes essential. One of the main characteristics of massive IoT is small data transmissions. To improve the support of them, the 3GPP has included two novel optimizations in LTE: one of them based on the Control Plane (CP), and the other on the User Plane (UP). In this paper, we analyze the average energy consumption per data packet using these two optimizations…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is advancing and the adoption of internet-connected devices in everyday use is constantly growing. This increase not only affects the traffic from other sources in the network, but also the communication quality requirements, like Quality of Service (QoS), for the IoT devices and applications. With the rise of dynamic network management and dynamic network programming technologies like Software-Defined Networking (SDN), traffic management and communication quality requirements can be tailored to fit niche use cases and characteristics. We propose a publish/subscrib…
