Pathway to Smart Infrastructure: Project i-IoT

Source: IEEE ISCAS, 2016

"Infrastructural internet of things (i-IoTs) are the future of smart cities."

Self Powered sensor: Piezo floating-gate sensor

Source: Frontiers, 2019

"Sense-now retrieve-later"

Project Description:
The core technology uses a self-powering method which directly harvests computational and storage energy from slight strain variations in the civil infrastructure. The event signatures can then be stored on non-volatile memory and remotely retrieved at a later period of time. This phenomenon is referred to "sense now retrieve later" paradigm, self-powering is only used for continuous sensing and data-logging of essential statistics; whereas, data retrieval and reconfiguration are achieved using low-cost RFID system. The modular nature of our current prototypes makes it compatible with commercial RFID readers and also follow FCC compliance so that the technology can easily be integrated with other IoT network infrastructure.
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Infrastructure to Vehicular Communication: Hybrid RFID

Source: IEEE MWSCAS, 2019

"Local communication on-the-go"

Project Description:
While autonomous and networked vehicles are being designed to navigate under different driving conditions, there is an emerging need for the infrastructure (roadways) to communicate with the vehicles so as to reliably convey current road conditions. Wireless sensors or devices that are embedded inside the infrastructure can facilitate real-time information exchange, however, its design requires a careful trade-off between different factors such as operational lifetime, communication distance and latency. We developed three particular methods for establishing a radio-frequency communication link within our previously reported framework of infrastructural Internet-of-Things (i-IoT). We propose a figure of merit (FOM) to compare and contrast different topologies of infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) communication devices which includes the traditional battery-powered approach, a passive approach that harvests RF energy for its power source and only polls a sensor when power is available, and a hybrid approach that leverages an RF harvesting mechanism to activate a battery-powered sensor, more details available in our conference paper. The estimated FOM suggests that a hybrid approach is the most pragmatic for the particular use case of road-condition monitoring.
List of Publications:

Project EMbed: Embedded wireless sensor framework

Source: AIMLAB, 2019

"Tamper-resist Sensor Network"

Project Description:
Wireless sensing networks (WSNs) have been widely studied, very little has been work has been done on embedded WSNs for smart infrastructure applications. In this research, we develop a novel sensor-node platform that can be embedded inside civil structures to enable efficient operation and maintenance of transportation infrastructure. New challenges such as sensor operation while embedding and resilience to excess stress are under investigation to enable additional security to these IoT devices. We explore this design space using our custom-built Piezo Floating-Gate (PFG) sensor as the primary data collection mechanism. This sensing modality is combined with our earlier reported RF-trigger (Hybrid RFID) mechanism to shift the limiting case of our prototype to a lifetime of components instead of battery life. Preliminary results from field testing were presented in our earlier papers using our custom-designed sensors to show the feasibility of real-time interrogation.
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