Section: Application Domains

Ambient Intelligence: WSN and IoT

Sensor networks have been investigated and deployed for decades already; their wireless extension, however, has witnessed a tremendous growth in recent years. This is mainly attributed to the development of wireless sensor networks (wsn s): a large number of sensor nodes, reliably operating under energy constraints. It is anticipated that within a few years, sensors will be deployed in a variety of scenarios, ranging from environmental monitoring to health care, from the public to the private sector. Prior to large-scale deployment, however, many problems have to be solved, such as the extraction of application scenarios, design of suitable software and hardware architectures, development of communication and organization protocols, validation and first steps of prototyping, etc. The Citi laboratory has a long experience in wsn which led recently to the creation of a start-up company, led by two former Citi members: Hikob (http://openlab.hikob.com ).

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is defined as a very large set of systems interconnected to provide a virtual twin world interacting with the real world. In our work we will mostly focus on wireless systems since the wireless link is the single media able to provide a full mobility and ubiquitous access. Wireless IoT is not a reality yet but will probably result from the convergence between mobile radio access networks and wireless sensor networks. If radio access networks are able to connect almost all humans, they would fail to connect a potential of several billions of objects. Nevertheless, the mutation of cellular systems toward more adaptive and autonomous systems is ongoing. This is why Socrate develops a strong activity in this applicative area, with its major industrial partners: Orange Labs and Alcatel-Lucent Bell labs.

For instance, the definition of a smart node intermediate between a wsn and a complex sdr terminal is one of the research directions followed in Socrate, explicitly stated in the adt Snow project. Other important contributions are made in the collaboration with SigFox and Euromedia and in the EconHome project.