From Best-effort Monitoring to Feedback Control: How Synchronous Transmissions Enable the Future Internet of Things

Wirelessly networked sensors, actuators, and computing elements are increasingly being brought to bear on societal-scale problems ranging from disaster response and personalized medicine to precision agriculture and intelligent transportation. Often referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT) or Cyber-physical Systems (CPS), these networks are embedded in the environment for monitoring and controlling physical processes.

In this talk, I will begin by illustrating some of the opportunities and challenges of these emerging systems using a real-world application scenario. I will highlight how we tackle the challenge of wirelessly networking the IoT devices in a predictable and adaptive, yet highly efficient manner. At the core of our solution is a disruptive communication paradigm we conceived, synchronous transmissions, that allowed us to build a wireless bus that abstracts a complex multi-hop wireless network as a single entity with known properties and predictable behavior. Besides its superior performance and reliability compared with state-of-the-art solutions, I will show that the broadcast communication model of the wireless bus enables applying concepts from distributed computing, embedded systems, and feedback control to provide functionality and formally proven guarantees previously thought impossible.