Internet of Things (IoT) has provided a promising opportunity to build powerful industrial systems and applications by leveraging the growing ubiquity of radio-frequency identification (RFID), and wireless, mobile, and sensor devices. A wide range of industrial IoT applications have been developed and deployed in recent years. In an effort to understand the development of IoT in industries, this paper reviews the current research of IoT, key enabling technologies, major IoT applications in industries, and identifies research trends and challenges. A main contribution of this review paper is that it summarizes the current state-of-the-art IoT in industries systematically.

Internet of Things in Industries: A Survey

Fog/edge computing has been proposed to be integrated with Internet of Things (IoT) to enable computing services devices deployed at network edge, aiming to improve the user’s experience and resilience of the services in case of failures. With the advantage of distributed architecture and close to end-users, fog/edge computing can provide faster response and greater quality of service for IoT applications. Thus, fog/edge computing-based IoT becomes future infrastructure on IoT development. To develop fog/edge computing-based IoT infrastructure, the architecture, enabling techniques, and issues related to IoT should be investigated first, and then the integration of fog/edge computing and IoT should be explored. To this end, this paper conducts a comprehensive overview of IoT with respect to system architecture, enabling technologies, security and privacy issues, and present the integration of fog/edge computing and IoT, and applications. Particularly, this paper first explores the relationship between cyber-physical systems and IoT, both of which play important roles in realizing an intelligent cyber-physical world. Then, existing architectures, enabling technologies, and security and privacy issues in IoT are presented to enhance the understanding of the state of the art IoT development. To investigate the fog/edge computing-based IoT, this paper also investigate the relationship between IoT and fog/edge computing, and discuss issues in fog/edge computing-based IoT. Finally, several applications, including the smart grid, smart transportation, and smart cities, are presented to demonstrate how fog/edge computing-based IoT to be implemented in real-world applications.

A Survey on Internet of Things: Architecture, Enabling Technologies, Security and Privacy, and Applications

Frequencies from 100 GHz to 3 THz are promising bands for the next generation of wireless communication systems because of the wide swaths of unused and unexplored spectrum. These frequencies also offer the potential for revolutionary applications that will be made possible by new thinking, and advances in devices, circuits, software, signal processing, and systems. This paper describes many of the technical challenges and opportunities for wireless communication and sensing applications above 100 GHz, and presents a number of promising discoveries, novel approaches, and recent results that will aid in the development and implementation of the sixth generation (6G) of wireless networks, and beyond. This paper shows recent regulatory and standard body rulings that are anticipating wireless products and services above 100 GHz and illustrates the viability of wireless cognition, hyper-accurate position location, sensing, and imaging. This paper also presents approaches and results that show how long distance mobile communications will be supported to above 800 GHz since the antenna gains are able to overcome air-induced attenuation, and present methods that reduce the computational complexity and simplify the signal processing used in adaptive antenna arrays, by exploiting the Special Theory of Relativity to create a cone of silence in over-sampled antenna arrays that improve performance for digital phased array antennas. Also, new results that give insights into power efficient beam steering algorithms, and new propagation and partition loss models above 100 GHz are given, and promising imaging, array processing, and position location results are presented. The implementation of spatial consistency at THz frequencies, an important component of channel modeling that considers minute changes and correlations over space, is also discussed. This paper offers the first in-depth look at the vast applications of THz wireless products and applications and provides approaches for how to reduce power and increase performance across several problem domains, giving early evidence that THz techniques are compelling and available for future wireless communications.

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Wireless Communications and Applications Above 100 GHz: Opportunities and Challenges for 6G and Beyond

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an enabling technology to engineer the radio signal propagation in wireless networks. By smartly tuning the signal reflection via a large number of low-cost passive reflecting elements, IRS is capable of dynamically altering wireless channels to enhance the communication performance. It is thus expected that the new IRS-aided hybrid wireless network comprising both active and passive components will be highly promising to achieve a sustainable capacity growth cost-effectively in the future. Despite its great potential, IRS faces new challenges to be efficiently integrated into wireless networks, such as reflection optimization, channel estimation, and deployment from communication design perspectives. In this paper, we provide a tutorial overview of IRS-aided wireless communications to address the above issues, and elaborate its reflection and channel models, hardware architecture and practical constraints, as well as various appealing applications in wireless networks. Moreover, we highlight important directions worthy of further investigation in future work.

Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial

http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jmjornet/papers/2014/j1.pdf

Full length article: Terahertz band: Next frontier for wireless communications

—Communications in the terahertz band (THz) (0.1– 10 THz) have been regarded as a promising technology for future 6G and beyond wireless systems, to overcome the challenges of evergrowing wireless data trafﬁc and crowded spectrum. As the frequency increases from the microwave band to the THz band, new spectrum features pose unprecedented challenges to wireless communication system design. The molecular absorption effect is one of the new THz spectrum properties, which enlarges the path loss and noise at speciﬁc frequencies. This brings in a double-edged sword for THz wireless communication systems. On one hand, from the data rate viewpoint, molecular absorption is detrimental, since it mitigates the received signal power and degrades the channel capacity. On the other hand, it is worth noticing that for wireless security and covertness, the molecular absorption effect can be utilized to safeguard THz communications among users. In this paper, the features of the molecular absorption effect and their impact on the THz system design are analyzed under various scenarios, with the ultimate goal of providing guidelines to how better exploit this unique THz phenomenon. Speciﬁcally, since the molecular absorption greatly depends on the propagation medium, different communication scenarios consisting of various media are discussed, including terrestrial, air and space, sea surface and nano-scale communica- tions. Furthermore, two novel molecular absorption enlightened secure and covert communication schemes are presented, where the molecular absorption effect is utilized as the key and unique feature to boost security and covertness.

Molecular Absorption Effect: A Double-edged Sword of Terahertz Communications

Terahertz (THz) communication has been regarded as one of the most promising technologies for sixth generation (6G) wireless communication systems. However, the THz waves with the characteristic of strong directionality are easily blocked by indoor obstacles, leading to a communication interruption. To this end, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is considered in THz multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In this paper, an efficient artificial gene reservation aided genetic algorithm, namely AGR-GA, is proposed by reserving the good genes and eliminating the inferior genes during the iterative process. Simulation results demonstrate that, in contrast with the exhaustive search scheme, the AGR-GA slightly endures 0.98 bps/Hz performance compromise with negligible complexity.

Artificial Gene Reservation Aided Genetic Algorithm for IRS Enabled Terahertz Systems

Terahertz (THz) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a promising interdisciplinary technology that realizes simultaneously transmitting Terabit-per-second (Tbps) and millimeter-level accurate environment or human activity sensing. However, both communication performance and sensing accuracy are influenced by the Doppler effects and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which are especially severe in the THz band. In this paper, a discrete Fourier transform spread orthogonal time frequency space (DFT-s-OTFS) system for THz ISAC is proposed with a two-stage sensing parameter estimation algorithm. The proposed sensing algorithm can realize millimeter-level range estimation accuracy and decimeter-per-second velocity estimation accuracy. Moreover, the proposed DFT-s-OTFS can improve the power amplifier efficiency by 10% on average compared to OTFS and enhance the sensing accuracy by one order of magnitude and the bit error rate performance by two orders of magnitude in high-mobility scenarios in contrast with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and discrete Fourier transform spread OFDM (DFT-s-OFDM).

An Energy-Efficient DFT-Spread Orthogonal Time Frequency Space System for Terahertz Integrated Sensing and Communication

TeraHertz (THz) communications are envisioned as a promising technology, owing to its unprecedented multi-GHz bandwidth. One fundamental challenge when moving to new spectrum is to understand the science of radio propagation and develop an accurate channel model. In this paper, a wideband channel measurement campaign between 130 GHz and 143 GHz is investigated in a typical meeting room. Directional antennas are utilized and rotated for resolving the multi-path components (MPCs) in the angular domain. With careful system calibration that eliminates system errors and antenna effects, a realistic power delay profile is developed. Furthermore, a combined MPC clustering and matching procedure with ray-tracing techniques is proposed to investigate the cluster behavior and wave propagation of THz signals. In light of the measurement results, physical parameters and insights in the THz indoor channel are comprehensively analyzed, including the line-of-sight path loss, power distributions, temporal and spatial features, and correlations among THz multi-path characteristics. Finally, a hybrid channel model that combines ray-tracing and statistical methods is developed for THz indoor communications. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid channel model shows good agreement with the measurement and outperforms the conventional statistical and geometric-based stochastic channel model in terms of the temporal-spatial characteristics.

Channel Measurement and Ray-Tracing-Statistical Hybrid Modeling for Low-Terahertz Indoor Communications

Terahertz (THz) communications have emerged as a promising candidate to support the heavy data traffic and exploding network capacity in the future 6G wireless networks. However, THz communications are facing many challenges for practical implementation, such as propagation loss, signal blockage, and hardware cost. In this article, we introduce an emerging paradigm called intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted THz communications to address the above issues, by leveraging the joint active and passive beamforming to enhance the communication quality and reduce overheads. Aiming at practical implementation, we first give an overview of the currently available approches of realizing THz active/passive beam steering at transmitter and IRS, respectively. Based on these capabilities, we introduce a beam training strategy for establishing joint beamforming in THz communications. Later, we present various emerging and appealing 6G scenarios that integrate IRS into THz communications. Finally, we provide open challenges and future research directions for this new paradigm.

Chong Han

Papers

Molecular Absorption Effect: A Double-edged Sword of Terahertz Communications

Artificial Gene Reservation Aided Genetic Algorithm for IRS Enabled Terahertz Systems

An Energy-Efficient DFT-Spread Orthogonal Time Frequency Space System for Terahertz Integrated Sensing and Communication

Channel Measurement and Ray-Tracing-Statistical Hybrid Modeling for Low-Terahertz Indoor Communications

Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces Assisted Terahertz Communications toward 6G.