WINTERTIME project, low-power-radio IoT wireless mesh

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The Wireless Networks Group (WNG) is leading WINTERTIME, a project to design and implement a wireless mesh for the internet of things (IoT) with low-power radios.

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows the integration of all kinds of objects into common telecommunications networks, facilitating interaction between users and "things" in everyday environments through applications for home, the city, transport or the intelligent industry, among many others. IoT devices generally have a wireless communication interface, but due to their very low consumption and low cost requirements, the technologies commonly used for personal communications (e.g. Wi-Fi or LTE) are not suitable. The main idea of the project is to integrate users and "things" in the same network, despite the fact that they use incompatible communication technologies.



In a Wake Up Radio (WuR) system, there is a primary radio for high capacity and low latency communications, having also high energy needs, which is why it is desirable to keep it in an energy saving state as long as possible. While the primary radio is off, a low-power secondary radio remains active. This secondary radio or wake-up radio is responsible for "waking up" the primary radio upon request.

This project is proposed as an extension of the ALLINONE project, which was also developed by WNG. In ALLINONE, WuR mechanisms are developed and tested with the potential to be used to communicate devices with non-compatible primary radios. With this approach, in addition to the application focused on energy savings, the possibility of having an additional low-cost and low-power radio in any electronic device opens the doors to a large number of new applications. These new applications are the focus of the project, which aims to design, analyze and develop different applications of a low power radio system within the framework of a wireless mesh network. This architecture could facilitate the integration of IoT in 5G (case of mass communications between machines), being also useful in vehicular communications scenarios or even in satellite networks.

The project was funded by the Spanish State Research Agency with an allocation of 163,350 euros. The project started in 2020 and will finish in 2024.


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