Date of Thesis

2017

Description

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to allow everyday objects to connect to the Internet and interact with users and other machines ubiquitously. Central to this vision is a pervasive wireless communication network connecting each end device. For individual IoT applications it is costly to deploy a dedicated network or connect to an existing cellular network, especially as these applications do not fully utilize the bandwidth provided by modern high speeds networks (e.g., WiFi, 4G LTE). On the other hand, decades of wireless research have produced numerous low-cost chip radios and effective networking stacks designed for short-range communication in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical Radio band (ISM band). In this thesis, we consider adapting this existing technology to construct shared regional low-powered networks using commercially available ISM band transceivers. To maximize network coverage, we focus on low-power wide-area wireless communication which enables links to reliably cover 10 km or more depending on terrain transmitting up to 1 Watt Equivalent Isotropically Radiated Power (EIRP). With potentially thousands of energy constrained IoT devices vying for extremely limited bandwidth, minimizing network coordination overhead and maximizing channel utility is essential. To address these challenges, we propose a distributed queueing (DQ) based MAC protocol, DQ-N. DQ-N exhibits excellent performance, supporting thousands of IoT devices from a single base station. In the future, these networks could accommodate a heterogeneous set of IoT applications, simplifying the IoT application development cycle, reducing total system cost, improving application reliability, and greatly enhancing the user experience.

Keywords

internet of things, mac layer protocols, IoT planning

Access Type

Honors Thesis

Degree Type

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering

Major

Computer Science & Engineering

First Advisor

Alan Marchiori

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