Use Cases

Medical IoT

The most challenging aspects for wireless medical devices on patients are:

• Low-Power for long lifetime
• Long-Range for mobility and daily use
• Interference robustness for all-time reliability

To assist physicians in hospitals and operating rooms efficiently and effectively with wireless equipment, device communication must be reliable and easily accessible. Devices can be buried under a pile of other equipment, contain metal, or other electrical components, which result in rich multipath, interference, and shadowed propagation of the radio waves. This requires wireless communication under large interference and low SNR.

Industrial IoT

IIoT is the most challenging scenario of the internet of things. Industrial automation requires a massive access on the radio channel in a very sporadic and flexible manner. Coordinating such a massive radio access under high mobility, combined with ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC) for high safety-margins and high processing standards, becomes extremely challenging. Flexible, robust, and low-latency signaling schemes, such as MOXZ, are necessary to cope with these scenarios and demands. Additionally, positioning with high precession (sub-centimeter) will be needed for the many manufacturing steps. Fabrics will also shield radio waves from outside mobile networks or satellite networks, such as GPS, which requires a new and private wireless solution for these smart factories.

Agriculture IoT

Automation in agriculture requires massive use of sensors, deployed over a vast areas of farmland, with:

• Low-Power for long lifetime
• Long-Range
• Low-Complexity to reduce cost in massive deployments and increase robustness of outdoor hardware

Sensors need to measure in regular or sporadic intervals, temperature, moisture, nutrition levels, etc. to efficiently operate irrigation and fertilization systems. Additionally, drones can harvest crops from the fields, or the information from sensors, which will introduce mobile and sporadic communication.

IoET - Internet of Everything

The Internet-of-Things or Internet-of-Everything is the coin-term for a massive machine-type driven communication (mMTC), classified in its countless applications, such as Smart Cities, Factories, Homes or Agriculture, Industry, Health and many more. To connect these machine-things to the internet, radio access technology is needed, which allows:

• Massive User/Device Access
• Low-Power for long lifetime
• Low-Complexity for low-cost production
• Ultra-reliability low-latency communication (URLLC) for critical control applications
• High Spectral-Efficiency for high data-rates
• Robustness against Doppler shifts for high mobility

Sensors need to measure in regular or sporadic intervals, temperature, moisture, nutrition levels, etc. to efficiently operate irrigation and fertilization systems. Additionally, drones can harvest crops from the fields, or the information from sensors, which will introduce mobile and sporadic communication.

High-Speed Trains

High-Speed trains are expected to transport thousands of people at speeds of above 600km/h. To guarantee a reliable steady communication link the physical layer requires:

• Low-Latency for seamless handshake (between different Base-stations)
• High-Doppler robustness
• Massive User access
• High-Data rates for video streaming applications

Cars

Communication between cars and infrastructure, called car-to-car/infrastructure (C2C/C2I) or vehicle-to-vehicle/infrastructure (V2V/V2I), is the propellant factor in a self-driving transportation on the roads. The main challenges in vehicle communication and sensing are:

• High-Mobility (relative speed differences of up to 300km/h)
• Low-Latency due to short-range (blockage) and fast speeds
• Accurate Radar Positioning
• Asynchronous and sporadic communication
• Multipath Propagation and User Interference

Drones

Drones or Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicles (UAV) face multiple challenges:

• Low-Power for long flight-time
• Long-Range for large operational flight area
• Non-LOS propagation in urban areas at low altitude, no visible contact
• High-Datarates for Video surveillance (live streaming, navigating)

RFID

New RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) technologies aim to develop massive low-cost RF tags which not only return in a passive or semi-passive manner the IDs to a reader, but also identifies their locations from a distance >100m. Such functionality is essential for warehouses and stores. Since this also will increase the number of tags/devices in a given sensing area, multiple and secure access has to be realized. Secure localization and identification of any type of items is driving the RFID industry, allowing for new forms of wireless paying and user identification.