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Research_

Our research: Internet of Things

The interconnectivity of wireless communications and networks
Our Internet of Things (IoT) research focuses on wireless communications, networks, sensor devices, data technologies and their applications in smart grids and critical infrastructure.

IoT is becoming an essential technology to support the revolution of various vertical sectors such as agriculture, industry, energy, healthcare and transportation. This is achieved through sensing, communications, data analytics, decision intelligence and action automation. Our focus on IoT research includes connectivity, analytics and intelligence.

Our experts: Dr Wanchun Liu, Professor Yonghui Li, Professor Branka Vucetic

Wireless networked control systems (WNCSs) have many applications in industrial automation, intelligent transportation systems, and smart grids.

In general, a WNCS is a spatially distributed control system consisting of a dynamic plant, a set of sensors that measure and report the plant state, a remote controller that collects the sensors’ measurement and generates control signals, and a set of actuators that control the plant based on the received control signals.

Our project aims to develop new control-communications codesign theory and algorithms to enable high-performance and large-scale WNCSs. 

Our experts: Dr Wanchun Liu

Our partner: Associate Professor Xiangyun (Sean) Zhou (Australian National University, Canberra)

This project expands on our recent invention of a novel radio-frequency (RF) receiver named splitting receiver, and aims to develop next-generation RF receivers for achieving high-throughput, high-reliability and low-latency wireless communications in IoT applications.

We are proposing RF receiver architectures with novel signal processing methods and are developing information-theoretical tools for analyzsng the performance of the receivers.

We are also working on simulation and hardware implementation of the proposed receivers.

Our experts: Dr Wanchun Liu, Professor Yonghui Li, Professor Branka Vucetic

For future Internet-of-Things based Big Data applications, data collection from ubiquitous smart sensors with limited spectrum bandwidth is very challenging.

It is also challenging for an edge fusion centre running computing tasks over large data sets with a limited computation capacity to interpret the meaning behind the collected data.

To tackle these challenges, by exploiting the superposition property of multiple-access channel and the functional decomposition,the recently proposed technique, over-the-air computation (AirComp), enables an effective joint data collection and computation from concurrent sensor transmissions.

Our project aims to develop new AirComp systems and novel algorithms for high-efficiency pervasive wireless data fusion.

Our experts: Dr Zihuai Lin

In this project, novel passive radio technologies will be developed to achieve low power and low cost communications for massive IoT. Two examples of existing passive radios are RFID and ambient backscatter communications (AmBC). We will develop new solutions to tackle the coverage and interference challenges faced by the existing solutions. The developed solutions will be useful in applications such as smart home and smart healthcare.

Director, Internet of Things

Professor Branka Vucetic
Professor Branka Vucetic
Academic profile