NeTS: Medium: Towards Unifying the Last-Mile Technologies of Low-Power Wide Area Networks

Diverse Internet of Things (IoT) applications may have different requirements for the bandwidth and range of wireless network connectivity. This project develops a unified framework to integrate different low-power wireless technologies, e.g., Long Range (LoRa) and Bluetooth wireless networks, for IoT applications. It can significantly reduce the cost of low-power wireless infrastructure and deployment while preserving performance and efficiency. In addition, the project engages soil science experts to deploy the proposed system for real-world farming applications and collaborates with industry partners. It also introduces laboratory-oriented curricula on IoT systems, enhances existing courses, delivers tutorials at conferences, and engages undergraduate students in research. This project aims to design, implement, deploy, and evaluate a multi-protocol networking system solution to unify the last-mile technologies for low-power wireless communications. It consists of three thrusts: 1) a multi-protocol gateway is developed with a wide-band radio frontend that can efficiently capture multiple channels, analyze and identify the protocols in use, and process radio signal samples to be transported to the cloud in real time. 2) Adaptive compression algorithms are designed to stream signal samples to the cloud for baseband physical layer and medium access control (MAC) layer processing, which ensures reliable recovery at the cloud while meeting varying backhaul bandwidth constraints. 3) Smart receivers are designed to combine the reconstructed signals that are compressed from multiple gateways coherently to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and transmission performance. The developed system will be evaluated through field deployment to demonstrate its feasibility. 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.