Collaborative Research: CISE MSI: RDP: NeTS: Enabling Spectrum-Efficient Wireless Coexistence for Heterogeneous IoT over 2.4GHz: A Hardware Software Framework Co-Design

The unlicensed Industrial, Scientific, and Medical wireless frequency bands at 2.4GHz have supported a broader range of emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications that benefit people’s daily life. Diverse wireless protocols supporting heterogeneous IoT devices coexist on the crowded 2.4GHz, resulting in a significant challenge of spectrum management. Their uncoordinated multiple access not only quickly depletes the limited spectrum resource but also significantly drains the power of low-complexity IoT devices. This project designs a novel hardware-software co-design communication framework that enable parallel communication for heterogeneous IoT devices, fundamentally enhancing spectrum utilization and power efficiency. The proposed framework advances the understandings of enhancing the spectrum utilization and power efficiency for large-scale heterogeneous IoT systems, such as smart healthcare, industrial IoT, and many more crucial sectors requiring continuous connections among disparate system objects. The success of this project allows coexisting IoT devices to work coherently without compromising their own communication performance, which is indispensable for the wide adoption of heterogeneous IoT devices. By leveraging Software-Defined Radios (SDRs) as gateways to manage the IoT device, this project renovates both hardware and software stacks to enable future spectrum-efficient and power-efficient heterogeneous IoT systems. To minimize the power consumption in digital domain, Thrust 1 designs and implements a novel RF real-time signal processor for synchronizing SDR with heterogeneous IoT devices. Thrust 2 designs a new physical-level parallel inclusive communication paradigm for spectrum-efficient downlink transmission, by which a software-designed signal can be decoded by multiple protocols with exclusive messages. Combining the previous hardware-software efforts, Thrust 3 tackles uncoordinated multiple access by innovating a data-driven cross-layer approach for uplink transmissions among heterogeneous IoT devices. To ensure the framework's effectiveness, the team will build a testbed and collect data for public use. This project seeks to broaden the scientific view of undergraduates and underrepresented students in the minority-serving institution, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, in the field of wireless communications and networking and prepare them with the cross-disciplinary skills needed to succeed in the modern workforce. The integrated research activities proposed in this project will enhance the long-term collaboration among Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, Clemson University, and Florida State University. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.