SDR-Based Industrial IoT: Towards Ubiquitous Wireless Connectivity

The influx of technology into existing industries has brought about nothing short of a new industrial revolution (i.e., Industry 4.0). Not only does this revolution imply the need for process monitoring on an unprecedented scale, the processes to be monitored are often already in place and poorly suited for many existing (wired) monitoring technologies due to limitations concerning cost, footprint, scale, etc. To combat these limitations, an increasing number of organizations are looking into wireless solutions. Nonetheless, some environments are so prohibitive that even state of the art wireless technologies can’t achieve ubiquitous connectivity. Isolated industrial sites with large metal constructions such as petrochemical plants, ship compartments, oilrigs and container terminals come to mind. In such challenging environments, it is not uncommon to observe highly localized changes in wireless link quality due to time-varying effects. As such, rather than using fixed radio settings, each individual wireless link could be configured according to its local operating conditions. The main benefits of this approach are twofold: (i) area agnostic network optimization within a single deployment and (ii) ubiquitous connectivity in challenging industrial sites. The goal of this project is to enable such area agnostic / ubiquitous connectivity for industry by harnessing the radio flexibility of future wireless platforms, i.e., Software-Defined Radios (SDRs) for IoT.