Smart IoT Communication: Circuits and Systems

Abstract

In a smart IoT system, multi-sensing at a field node is a typical scenario. The examples considered in this study are pollution monitoring and smart energy metering. In such applications, energy sustainability and communication and storage resource usage optimization are two of the key issues of interest. In this study, on one hand it is intended to develop indigenous beyond state of the art multi-sensing boards with the inherent smartness in energy replenishment and sensing/communication activities. On the other hand, smart data collection and processing at the end node (fog node or edge node) is of interest primarily from efficient communication bandwidth usage perspective. On the first exercise towards energy sustainable IoT sensing and communication board design, we have designed a prototype for a 5G capable environmental air pollution monitoring system. The system measures concentrations of NO2, ozone, CO and SO2 using semiconductor sensors. Further, the system gathers other environmental parameters like temperature, humidity, PM1, PM2.5 and PM10. The prototype is equipped with a GPS sub-system for accurate geo-tagging. The board communicates through Wi-Fi and NB-IoT. The board is also equipped with energy harvesting power management, and is powered through solar energy and battery backup. On the second exercise, a working model of a smart IoT device with a data pruning subsystem is designed, where a smart energy meter is considered for an example application. As a proof of concept we plan to demonstrate data compression at the edge to save bandwidth required for data transmission to a remote cloud. At each smart meter, sparsity of data is exploited to devise an adaptive data reduction algorithm using compressive sampling technique such that the bandwidth requirement for smart meter data transmission is reduced with minimum loss of information. The Smart Energy Meter is WiFi and NB-IoT enabled. This meter is capable of logging multiple energy consumption parameters. The overall objective has been demonstrating the ability of beyond state of the art circuits and system design for IoT communications, wherein context specific intelligence is applied at the at the node. The broad philosophy in this study can be readily extended to any chosen IoT application.