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Work Package 5

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents an enormous potential in transforming the way we live and do business. With an estimated 500 billion IoT devices in the next decade, the IoT provides a global connectivity of sensors and actuators to form a computer network of unprecedented nature and with large challenges to support connectivity of this massive number of devices as well as designing scalable network and storage systems able to service these new demands.

Our research activities concerns IoT as enabling technology in digitalisation. More specifically, our research activities will focus on the following four areas: 

  1. IoT connectivity
    The IoT connectivity challenge embraces the need for innovative digital transmission schemes, error control coding with high performance and low latency, enhancing adaptive protocols to ensure robust and reliable communications on constrained computing platforms. This includes the design of novel modulation approaches, medium access control schemes and light-weight protocols.
  2. Robustness and signal reconstruction
    Our key challenge is to develop compressive sensing for the IoT and understand the fundamental trade-offs between quality of measurements and resource-usage, including, computation, network traffic, and energy at the IoT devices. We also explore its interplay with techniques such as network coding in order to further reduce the costs on the IoT devices and network use.
  3. Enabling technologies for IoT (fog/cloud storage and computing)
    Our key focus for storage in the Cloud is on theory and systems that can reduce the storage space used such as erasure codes and network coding, but also focusing on novel approaches that combine these erasure codes with massive-scale compressions techniques, e.g. data deduplication. Efficient storage techniques are not only critical to reduce the amount of space used for storage of data, but they are fundamental to allow algorithms for Big Data processing to efficiently operate on data that are naturally stored in multiple devices across the network.
  4. Internet of moving things
    Current communication networks fall short to adequately support communication environments involving mobile and static nodes. This often results in inefficient routing and loss of connectivity in the network. We are exploring the optimal routings in this area.

Collaboration between work package 5 and other work packages

Contact

Qi Zhang

Associate Professor