Fifth Generation (5G) cellular systems are already being deployed, which will make an enormous impact on our lives: These systems enable a variety of applications, such as remote surgery (as part of the Tactile Internet), augmented (virtual) reality, industrial and vehicular automation, autonomous driving, enhanced mobile broadband as well as Internet of Things (IoT). These applications will become an important part of our digitally connected lives and form the new infrastructure of the smart cities of the new future.
Among these applications, IoT appears as a key enabler of technologies that will be deployed in smart cities. Applications of IoT range from smart bins that indicate to the municipality when they are full, smart lamp posts that adjust their lighting in response to the needs of pedestrians and cars while reducing energy consumption, and a plethora of other services that smart cities will provide to their dwellers in smart hospitals, homes, factories and transportation. While 5G provides the necessary initial infrastructure world-wide for these diverse services to take off, the evolution towards Sixth Generation (6G) networks brings new challenges, especially in regard to Quality of Service (QoS), which refers to a diverse set of requirements that must be satisfied by the telecommunication network in order to deliver a smooth experience to its human users.
The goal of this project is to enable the delivery of Quality of Service (QoS) for the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart cities. Since seventy-five billion IoT devices are expected to be on the Internet by the year 2025, satisfying QoS for IoT is extremely challenging, as the problems of scalability, latency, reliability, energy efficiency and mobility must be solved jointly.
Towards this goal, the specific objectives of this project are (1) to develop forecasting algorithms in order to predict IoT traffic on the Internet, (2) to develop predictive QoS optimization algorithms targeted at IoT, and (3) to build a scalable network simulation of IoT devices in a representative smart city model.
