Personal tools

Difference between revisions of "FPGA-based Testbed Implementation of an Extended-Coverage Point-to-Point Communication Link for the Internet of Things"

From iis-projects

Jump to: navigation, search
Line 1: Line 1:
[[File:EC_P2P.png|thumb|500px|]]
+
[[File: siot.jpg|thumb|400px|]]
 
==Short Description==
 
==Short Description==
The Internet of Things (IoT) will be one of the key drivers of the semiconductor industry in the upcoming years with a wide range of potential applications such as smart appliances, wearables, or autonomous driving. Smart drones will be another vital part of IoT with various use cases like parcel delivery or drone taxis. Although the latter one still sounds like science fiction today, in fact first drone taxis are being planned to operate in Dubai later this year. The novelty of all these use cases makes new communication protocols inevitable resulting in today’s IoT standardization efforts including cellular IoT (Extended-Coverage-GSM and Narrowband-IoT) and clean-slate standards like SigFox or LoRa that are completely optimized towards IoT. While all these standards base on a base-station-centric network topology, little effort is spent on point-to-point communication links targeting IoT today.
+
Many future Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications such as asset tracking, smart farming, or geomonitoring require world-wide connectivity. While first cellular massive Machine-Type-Communication (mMTC) standards, namely Cat-M1 and Narrowband-IoT, extend cell-radii of cellular base stations to 40km due to new extended-coverage features, truely world-wide coverage using those technologies would not be viable from an economical point of view. Satellite-borne communication systems are very promising with this respective, either as a complementary technology to cellular connectivity by covering dead spots or as a stand-alone system. NB-IoT itself is seen as a possible technology for satellite IoT (sIoT) and in fact the extended-coverage would enable communication with satellites in Low Earth Orbits (LEO). But, the NB-IoT standard is optimized for slowly moving modems only, which directly contradicts the relative transmitter-receiver speeds of up to 27’000km/h for satellite communication systems.
  
The proposed project is a start to fill this gap by setting up an FPGA-testbed environment and emulate a first extended-coverage point-to-point link. Thereby, a base-station-centric cellular-IoT testbed serves as a starting point which consists of a vector signal generator mimicking a cellular IoT base station, an integrated analog RF-transceiver, and an FPGA evaluation platform emulating the user-equipment’s digital baseband processing. As the uplink and downlink communication protocol differ in cellular standards, the first step in this project is to align receive and transmit parts of the digital baseband processing in order to enable a direct point-to-point communication link. In a second step, the communication protocol will be gradually optimized towards the point-to-point use case with the main focus on extended coverage and low power consumption. As the bigger part of the affected digital baseband processing is mapped to a RISC-V processor, most of the work throughout the project requires embedded C coding, with some work in HDL being required eventually.
+
The goal of this project is to develop a communication system for satellite IoT applications which bases on the NB-IoT standard. In a first step the existing NB-IoT Matlab simulation framework shall be extended to support satellite communication channels. A thorough simulative analysis of system performance will enable the identification of critical bottlenecks. These shall be eliminated in the second part of the project by algorithmic optimizations and/or changes to the physical-layer specification itself.  
  
 
==Status: Available ==
 
==Status: Available ==
Line 10: Line 10:
  
 
==Prerequisites==
 
==Prerequisites==
: Knowledge in C/Cpp
+
: Knowledge in Matlab
  
 
==Professor==
 
==Professor==

Revision as of 15:17, 1 November 2019

Siot.jpg

Short Description

Many future Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications such as asset tracking, smart farming, or geomonitoring require world-wide connectivity. While first cellular massive Machine-Type-Communication (mMTC) standards, namely Cat-M1 and Narrowband-IoT, extend cell-radii of cellular base stations to 40km due to new extended-coverage features, truely world-wide coverage using those technologies would not be viable from an economical point of view. Satellite-borne communication systems are very promising with this respective, either as a complementary technology to cellular connectivity by covering dead spots or as a stand-alone system. NB-IoT itself is seen as a possible technology for satellite IoT (sIoT) and in fact the extended-coverage would enable communication with satellites in Low Earth Orbits (LEO). But, the NB-IoT standard is optimized for slowly moving modems only, which directly contradicts the relative transmitter-receiver speeds of up to 27’000km/h for satellite communication systems.

The goal of this project is to develop a communication system for satellite IoT applications which bases on the NB-IoT standard. In a first step the existing NB-IoT Matlab simulation framework shall be extended to support satellite communication channels. A thorough simulative analysis of system performance will enable the identification of critical bottlenecks. These shall be eliminated in the second part of the project by algorithmic optimizations and/or changes to the physical-layer specification itself.

Status: Available

Looking for Interested Master Students (Semester Project / Master Thesis)
Contact: Matthias Korb

Prerequisites

Knowledge in Matlab

Professor

Qiuting Huang

Related Projects

RF SoCs for the Internet of Things

↑ top