28th Workshop – Innovations in Wireless Technologies

The coming world is about connected devices and making them smarter. Light, heat, vibration or RF to supply IoT devices are a necessity due to economic and ecologic challenges the planet is facing. How are we going to improve IoT devices functionality and lifetime ? RF as a source of energy to supply IoT devices in the reality of applications.

In the Internet of Things vision, tens of billions of battery-powered devices will cooperate to support and improve daily life. However, replacing and disposing of billions of dead batteries per year is costly in terms of maintenance and ecologically irresponsible. We posit the vision of a sustainable Internet of Battery-less things, where devices can store small amount of energy in capacitors, harvested from their environment. This results in intermittent on-off behaviour, significantly complicating communications and computations. In this talk, our vision on battery-less IoT and energy harvesting will be explained, and we will share initial feasibility experiment results of communicating using LoRaWAN with battery-less devices.

Wherever there are humans, there is movement. Radar sensors can detect human activity via movements as small as those associated with skin movements due to our heartbeat or as large as those associated with limbs swaying while walking. Moreover, radar sensors do this in a non-contact and privacy preserving fashion. Imec works on two game changers in this sensor space: the first is high integration into CMOS systems-on-chip; the second is the marriage of radar sensing devices with AI, bringing unprecedented capabilities for detection and classification of human movement and behavior. In this talk, a few recent application examples will be given and we will discuss the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Demo 1: Tucana – Automated testing of a LoRaWAN endDevice

We will perform live Rx sensitivity, Tx performance and Lora Alliance Pre certification testing. FUOTA is the newest addition to the possibilities of the RWC LoraWAN tester. The tester can furthermore be used in Gateway testing and manufacturing, with easy integration through API.

slides

Demo 2: Televic – IR communication

Demonstration of Televic’s Lingua infra-red product family which allows multi-channel audio distribution.

Demo 3: imec – Radar sensing

Demonstration of multiple-people detection, localisation and tracking based on an off-the-shelf TI mm-wave radar module with imec radar processing algorithms.

Demo 4: e-peas – Energy harvesting

Demonstration of 868/915 MHz RF energy harvesting, and sensor data communication over BLE based on PV energy harvesting.

Innovations in RF technology and its application are enormous. Next to power and cost, challenges are also in domain of spectrum usage and interference. Infra-red communication offers a solution for (a part) of the challenges of RF, however it also has a few downsides. From technology point of view infra-red is quite old but still utilized in specific target applications. Televic Conference has developed a product family to allow multi-channel audio distribution within a room based on infra-red communication. We would like to share our experience in this domain and hope to show that wireless communication should not be associated with RF technology only.

In this tutorial-style presentation, an introduction is given to how different machine learning techniques improve the performance of wireless technologies. Different machine learning techniques (classification, regression, clustering, …) will be discussed, and their benefits will be illustrated by presenting use cases from recent wireless application domains.