Scientific summary
Many future applications within the Internet of Things (IoT) require communication between devices, whereby the bandwidth may be limited if the range is sufficiently large, and the communication costs sufficiently cheap and consumes little energy. To meet this need, a number of new technologies were recently introduced, grouped together under the heading Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) K Because LPWANs use radio frequencies below 1GHz, a single base station can have a very long range, typically going from 1 kilometer up to 50 km away. Installing 1 base station is therefore sufficient to connect up to 1000 devices, which in itself is revolutionizing the IoT landscape. There are currently several providers of such sub-GHz LPWAN technologies, all using the same radio band. Some examples of such technologies are LoRa, SigFox, IEEE802.15.4g and the recently announced IEEE802.11ah ("HaloW"). Many of these technologies, however, are still in their infancy, and quality-of-service optimizations, roaming and service management are missing. In addition, we expect interference to make the management of such networks very complex, as (i) the sub-GHz band is very limited in size and (ii) the long range of technologies inherently allows for more interaction between technologies. If no actions are taken, the sub-GHz bands will soon be full and unreliable.
To avoid this, the IDEAL-IoT project will develop advanced, highly configurable network components that, together with a coordination framework, can manage and optimize various interacting sub-Ghz wireless LPWANs in a uniform manner.