The Economical Internet of Things

Problem

The Internet of Things (IoT), as an emerging technology, has attracted substantial interest from academia, industry, and government. To continuously manage a massive number of devices in the cloud (e.g., over 50 million smart meters installed across the U.S.), immeasurable bills on cloud services may be charged to the IoT system providers – governments, and inevitably the users – us. Such an unaffordable burden on billing costs may severely restrain the wide adoption of IoT and restrict its potential. New design paradigms and engineering principles are urgently needed to help reduce such a huge billing cost.

Research goal

Building an economical IoT ecosystem leveraging a novel billing-driven design approach that effectively and efficiently orchestrates various complicated cloud services and distributed IoT devices. Given that distinctive thinking and engineering principles are required to transform from conventional design approaches to the new billing-driven design approach, we will design innovative billing-centric modeling, billing-control architecture, and billing-aware schemes as a complete solution to fully realize the billing-driven design for economical IoT systems.

Student Qualifications

• Self-motivated, responsible, and academically-excellent students.
• Commitment: research publication or deliverable research software program.
• Technical skills (one or more): Embedded system design with C programming, Network protocol design with Object-Oriented Programming, Cloud service development with C#, Java or Python

Student Responsibilities

Publish research papers in prestigious conference proceedings and workshops, Develop and maintain high-quality open-source research software, and Achieve excellence in both research and education.

Resources and additional content

Lab Facilities: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, SensorTag and other IoT devices, computers, and electronic measurement equipment, and Free Microsoft Azure cloud service subscription.