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

TeraHertz (THz) communications are envisioned as a promising technology, owing to its unprecedented multi-GHz bandwidth In this paper, wideband channel measurement campaigns at 140 GHz and 220 GHz are conducted in indoor scenarios including a meeting room and an office room Directional antennas are utilized and rotated for resolving the multi-path components (MPCs) in the angular domain Comparable path loss values are achieved in the 140 and 220 GHz bands To investigate the large-scale fading characteristics for indoor THz communications, single-band close-in path loss models are developed To further analyze the dependency on the frequency, two multi-band path loss models are analyzed, ie, alpha-beta-gamma (ABG) and multi-frequency CI model with a frequency-weighted path loss exponent (CIF), between which the ABG model demonstrates a better fit with the measured data Moreover, a coherent beam combination that constructively sums the signal amplitudes from various arrival directions can significantly reduce the path loss, in contrast with a non-coherent beam combination

Channel Measurement and Path-Loss Characterization for Low-Terahertz Indoor Scenarios

Directional antennas and beamforming techniques that bring promising transmission gain to the wireless links are widely incorporated in the system-level analysis of wireless networks. In many existing studies, the beamforming gain model to calculate the beamforming gain considers beamforming pattern and aligned as well as misaligned cases. However, the channel properties, e.g., the $K$ factor and the spatial distribution of multi-paths, are neglected, which could significantly influence the beamforming gain. In this paper, a general beamforming gain model is appropriately defined, while the traditional beamforming gain model is proved to be only a special case in the proposed general model by considering an oversimplified channel with no angular spread. In light of this, expressions of the received signal amplitude and the beamforming gain are rigorously derived for narrowband fading and wideband statistical mmWave channels, respectively. Thorough comparison between the proposed beamforming gain model and the traditional beamforming gain is provided, which demonstrates and validates that the traditional model incorrectly captures the beamforming gain and thereby, leads to inaccurate system-level network analysis. To this end, the effectiveness and importance of the proposed general beamforming gain model are revealed, particularly for millimeter-wave wideband systems.

On Beamforming Gain Models for Performance Evaluation and Analysis of Narrowband and Wideband Wireless Networks

Terahertz (THz) communications are regarded as a pillar technology for the 6G systems, by offering multi-ten-GHz bandwidth. To overcome the huge propagation loss, THz ultra-massive MIMO systems with hybrid beamforming are proposed to offer high array gain. Notably, the adjustable phase shifters considered in most existing hybrid beamforming studies are power-hungry and difficult to realize in the THz band. Moreover, due to the ultra-massive antennas, full channel-state-information (CSI) is challenging to obtain. To address these practical concerns, in this paper, an energy-efficient dynamic-subarray with fixed phase shifters (DS-FPS) architecture is proposed for THz hybrid beamforming. To compensate for the spectral efficiency loss caused by the fixed phase of FPS, a switch network is inserted to enable dynamic connections. In addition, by considering the partial CSI, we propose a row-successive-decomposition (RSD) algorithm to design the hybrid beamforming matrices for DS-FPS. A row-by-row (RBR) algorithm is further proposed to reduce the computational complexity. Extensive simulation results show that, the proposed DS-FPS architecture with the RSD and RBR algorithms achieves much higher energy efficiency than the existing architectures. Moreover, the spectral efficiency of the DS-FPS architecture with the proposed algorithms is robust to the CSI error.

Dynamic-Subarray With Fixed Phase Shifters for Energy-Efficient Terahertz Hybrid Beamforming Under Partial CSI

The Terahertz (0.1-10 THz) band has been envisioned as one of the promising spectrum bands to support ultra-broadband sixth-generation (6G) and beyond communications. In this paper, a wideband channel measurement campaign in a 500- square-meter indoor lobby at 306-321 GHz is presented. The measurement system consists of a vector network analyzer (VNA)-based channel sounder, and a directional antenna equipped at the receiver to resolve multi-path components (MPCs) in the angular domain. In particular, 21 positions and 3780 channel impulse responses (CIRs) are measured in the lobby, including the line-of-sight (LoS), non-line-of-sight (NLoS) and obstructed-line-of-sight (OLoS) cases. The multi-path characteristics are summarized as follows. First, the main scatterers in the lobby include the glass, the pillar, and the LED screen. Second, best direction and omni-directional path losses are analyzed. Compared with the close-in path loss model, the optimal path loss offset in the alpha-beta path loss model exceeds 86 dB in the LoS case, and accordingly, the exponent decreases to 1.57 and below. Third, more than 10 clusters are observed in OLoS and NLoS cases, compared to 2.17 clusters on average in the LoS case. Fourth, the average power dispersion of MPCs is smaller in both temporal and angular domains in the LoS case, compared with the NLoS and OLoS counterparts. Finally, in contrast to hallway scenarios measured in previous works at the same frequency band, the lobby which is larger in dimension and square in shape, features larger path losses and smaller delay and angular spreads.

300 GHz Wideband Channel Measurement and Analysis in a Lobby

Terahertz (THz) communications are envisioned as a promising technology for 6G and beyond wireless systems, providing ultra-broad continuous bandwidth and thus Terabit-per-second (Tbps) data rates. However, as foundation of designing THz communications, channel modeling and characterization are fundamental to scrutinize the potential of the new spectrum. Relied on time-consuming and costly physical measurements, traditional statistical channel modeling methods suffer from the problem of low accuracy with the assumed certain distributions and empirical parameters. In this paper, a transformer-based generative adversarial network modeling method (T-GAN) is proposed in the THz band, which exploits the advantage of GAN in modeling the complex distribution, and the powerful expressive capability of transformer structure. Experimental results reveal that the distribution of channels generated by the proposed T-GAN method shows good agreement with the original channels in terms of the delay spread and angular spread. Moreover, T-GAN achieves good performance in modeling the power delay angular profile, with 2.18 dB root-mean-square error (RMSE).

Chong Han

Papers

Channel Measurement and Path-Loss Characterization for Low-Terahertz Indoor Scenarios

On Beamforming Gain Models for Performance Evaluation and Analysis of Narrowband and Wideband Wireless Networks

Dynamic-Subarray With Fixed Phase Shifters for Energy-Efficient Terahertz Hybrid Beamforming Under Partial CSI

300 GHz Wideband Channel Measurement and Analysis in a Lobby

Transformer-based GAN for Terahertz Spatial-Temporal Channel Modeling and Generating