Towards low-energy, low-cost and high-performance IoT-based operation of interconnected systems
Benjamin Karg, Sergio Lucia · 2018
The advent of new communication standards for the Internet of Things (IoT), such as Sigfox or NB-IoT, opens a new set of possibilities that enable low-power communication between a large number of devices. New challenges such as very low data-rates are associated to these new technologies. This work shows that the combination of limited low-power communications and low-cost microcontrollers does not necessarily mean that simple, suboptimal strategies should be used to operate the cyber-physical-systems on which IoT devices are installed such as smart buildings and smart cities. In particular, predictive approaches based on numerical optimization, efficiently implemented on low-cost microcontrollers, counteract some of the shortcomings of low-power communication technologies and can enable the full potential of the internet of things. We present how low-power, low-cost solutions running advanced control and operation algorithms could be deployed and show the advantages of the proposed idea using Sigfox communication and simulation results for the temperature control of a smart building.