Things of the Internet

The "Internet of Things" is a generic term given to wireless networks of sensors and actuators that are IPV6 compliant. Sensors provide information about the state of the physical world, ranging from traffic and pollution levels in cities, to the amount of vibration in an industrial motor to occupancy levels in buildings. These sensor readings are processed by low power microcontrollers and sent wirelessly over a network, for eventual delivery to cloud-based services. Based on analysis of sensor and other data (e.g. tweets), actions are sent back to the network to alter timing of traffic lights or air conditioning levels. This module examines the fundamental properties of wireless communication and distributed data management, especially when subject to resource constraints such as limited battery power or memory. We focus on the "things" that actually create and deliver the data and place less emphasis on the cloud side of the IoT.

Frequency

This course normally runs once a year.

Course dates

Objectives

Objectives At the end of the course, students will: • understand the characteristics and properties of wireless sensors and networks • apply software engineering principles to designing communication protocols • be able to make decisions about how to engineer a system given certain constraints on cost, power consumption and performance • learn how to simulate communication protocols for wireless networks and evaluate their performance.

Contents

Introduction to the IOT properties of the IOT, sensors, actuators, constraints The Physical Layer Electromagnetic propagation, modulation schemes Medium Access Layer Approaches to fairly sharing limited bandwidth e.g. TDMA/CDMA/FDMA Routing Layer Routing in static and mobile sensor networks e.g. RPL Data Layer Computing under constraints, trade-offs between edge and cloud computing Application Layer Building services from primitives Design techniques and case-studies: Real world examples of IOT system design, common pitfalls

Requirements

Some familiarity with an OO language (e.g. Python/C++) would be beneficial.