Context

By embedding computational capabilities into every-day objects, it is possible to easily interact with the environment and draw out complex monitoring and actuation operations in several challenging and critical application areas, such as disaster recovery, smart agriculture, and industrial processes, among others. The consequent tidal increase of communications among humans and objects has made actual the concept of pervasive computing through its natural accomplishment, the Internet of Things (IoT). Triggered by such a revolutionary networking paradigm, a huge number of concurrent technological solutions have been proposed. In general, each technology is tailored to provide a specific coverage, to support a target data-rate, and to transport specific message sizes. Some of them have been standardized, while others are getting momentum in recent years after some incubation time. Specifically, Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) technologies will play a key role in the development of smart agriculture solutions, as well as in many other applications, including Smart Grid, Environmental Monitoring, and Emergency Management, among others. However, the abovementioned terrestrial technologies fail to provide global connectivity. Terrestrial networks are also highly vulnerable in case of natural disasters or terrorist attacks. Instead, satellite access networks, and, in particular, large-scale Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have shown their potential to extend terrestrial networks to address the above issues. In this context, satellites can be leveraged to support a world-wide expansion of the promising IoT market. Recently, the combination of satellite networks and LPWAN technologies has been proposed as a promising hybrid networking architecture. Indeed, backhauling satellite networks interconnecting LPWAN gateways provides both reachability in remote areas and redundancy in case of service disruption of the ground network.

Organization

The internship is organized as follows:

1. study of NB-IoT/LoRa and related state of the art on performance evaluation (1.5 months);
2. study of Direct-to-satellite IoT (1 month);
3. implementation of the wanted scenarios within the LoRaWAN-sim simulator (1.5 months);
4. preliminary evaluation of LEO-backhauled LPWAN networks (2 months).

Required skills

Excellent knowledge of communication networks (PHY and MAC layers), programming languages (Python and C at least).

Location and contact

The internship will take place at LAAS-CNRS (Toulouse, France) within the SARA team (Services et Architectures pour les Réseaux Avancés) under the supervision of Nicola Accettura (nicola.accettura@laas.fr) and Pascal Berthou (pascal.berthou@laas.fr).