Best Master’s Thesis in ICT 2019 (Supervised by Prof. Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi and Prof. Professor Magne Arild Hauglund)

Best Master’s Thesis in ICT 2019 (Supervised by Prof. Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi and Prof. Professor Magne Arild Hauglund)

Master Thesis: “Design and implementation of wake-up radios for long-range wireless IoT devices”

Best master thesis in ICT 2019 (Student and Professor).

Master Student Anders Frøytlog, did his Master’s Thesis under the main supervision of Professor Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi and co-supervision of Professor Magne Arild Hauglund. The project task is defined by Assoc. Prof. Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi. The solutions (especially DC-MAC protocol along with wakeup radio) proposed in the thesis greatly reduce the power consumption in long-range wireless IoT devices. A summary of the thesis can be found below.

Summary of the thesis: As the development within Internet of things (IoT) increases rapidly and the market starts to utilize its potential, an enormous effort is being made in both academia and industry to optimize solutions according to the market demands. The demands vary from case to case and some of them include high data rate, long battery lifetime, low latency, and long-range/area coverage depending on application scenarios. The numerous use cases and demands for IoT resulted in various IoT technologies.

System overview: Design and implementation of wake-up radios for long-range wireless IoT devices.

In many IoT applications, especially Wireless IoT applications, energy efficiency and battery lifetime are the most important performance metrics. The wireless access mechanisms used in current technologies utilize Duty-cycling (DC) to reduce power consumption. DC allows a node to turn the radio on and off in specific intervals in order to reduce power consumption. These DC-MAC protocols suffer from overhearing, idle listening, or unnecessary transmission of advertisement packets. The different protocols may also include long delay time caused by the inactive period in the MAC protocol. The recent research and development of Wake-up Radios (WuRs) address some of these problems. A WuR is a simple low-power radio receiver that always listens to the channel to detect a Wake-up Call (WuC). A wake-up radio receiver (WuRx) is attached to the main radio which is always OFF, except when it is supposed to send data. The WuRx and the main radio (MR) are two parts of an IoT node. The use of WuRx eliminates the unnecessary power consumption caused by idle listening and reduces the overhearing consumption as well as the latency. Many articles have been published about WuRs. However, most of the current WuR solutions focus on short-range applications. The objective of this thesis is to design a WuRx for long-range applications (10km to 15km range), implement a WuRx and evaluate the results and compare them to existing solutions.

Best Master’s Thesis in ICT 2018 (Supervised by Prof. Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi and Prof. Geir Jevne)

Master Thesis Title: Development, Deployment & Evaluation of Wireless IoT Devices with Energy Harvesting

Best master thesis in ICT 2018 (Students and Professors)

Students Rolf Arne Kjellby, Svein Erik Løtveit & Thor Eirik Johnsrud, did their Master’s Thesis under the main supervision of Professor Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi and co-supervision of Professor Geir Jevne. The project task is defined by Prof. Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi. Students designed and developed self-powered and ultra-low-powered wireless IoT devices for indoor and outdoor applications. These nodes are tested and work up to 1.8 km and can be deployed in remote places where accessibility is limited. The nodes can also be deployed in harsh weather conditions without requiring any maintenance. Designed nodes are of professional market quality, market-ready, efficient, self-powered, and maintenance-free. Many possibilities for further research based on these nodes including a start-up company.

Automation of indoor climate is becoming increasingly popular for both household and industrial use. Through automation, comfort increases and power consumption decreases. In order to deploy an automation system, sensors are required. This master thesis proposes two wireless sensor nodes based on ATmega328p along with the nRF24l01+ transceiver and nRF52840 with various capabilities in both star and multi-hop network configurations. The designed nodes are fully self-powered through energy harvesting, the nodes are completely self-sustainable with no wires, and no user intervention is required during the lifetime of the components. In addition, these nodes do not require any maintenance and can be deployed in remote places. The wireless sensor nodes can be deployed anywhere as long as they are in the range of a gateway or nodes that can forward towards a gateway, and as long as there is sufficient light level for the solar panel, such as indoor lights. Fully functional wireless sensor nodes are designed and tested and compared the performance of both star and multi-hop topologies. The developed nodes consume less power than what is harvested in both indoor and outdoor environments.