Longer range, in rural/urban IoT networks, allow a large geographical coverage with only a few base-stations, making their deployment and operation economical. In this paper we explore the 150-174 MHz spectrum for long range IoT networks comprising unlicensed MURS and licensed VHF narrowbands. Range in these bands is boosted by the lower RF frequencies as well as higher transmit powers allowed by the FCC. Through a 400 sq km wide area deployment study, we show that, these spectrum bands can provide > 20× the geographical coverage than that in the 900 MHz ISM band LoRa. Increased range translates to greater uplink IoT device traffic. The key contribution of this paper is a novel technique - Blind Distributed MU-MIMO, that allows capacity to scale with the number of antennas (base- stations) while not requiring any coordinated channel measurements between the devices and IoT base- stations. This requirement is crucial since in IoT networks power constrained IoT devices typically sleep and wake up to transmit short messages in response to unpredictable events without any coordination with the base-stations. We demonstrate the efficacy of Blind Distributed MU-MIMO through a real wide area deployment.

Wireless protocol design for IoT networks is an active area of research. We demonstrate tinySDR which is a low-power software-defined radio platform tailored to the needs of IoT endpoints. TinySDR is a standalone, fully programmable software-defined radio platform which has the requirements of IoT protocols. We present the physical layer implementations of BLE beacon and LoRa protocols to demonstrate the capabilities of tinySDR.

Wireless video streaming has traditionally been considered an extremely power-hungry operation. Existing approaches optimize the camera and communication modules individually to minimize their power consumption. However, designing a video streaming device requires power-consuming hardware components and video CODEC algorithms which makes battery-free video streaming currently infeasible. Existing RF-powered wireless camera prototypes require extensive duty-cycling on the order of tens of minutes, to capture, process and communicate a single frame. Self-powered cameras can capture an image once every few seconds, but do not have the capability to stream video wirelessly.

We show for the first time that commodity devices can be used to generate wireless data transmissions that are confined to the human body. Specifically, we show that commodity input devices such as fingerprint sensors and touchpads can be used to transmit information to only wireless receivers that are in contact with the body. We characterize the propagation of the resulting transmissions across the whole body and run experiments with ten subjects to demonstrate that our approach generalizes across different body types and postures. We also evaluate our communication system in the presence of interference from other wearable devices such as smartwatches and nearby metallic surfaces. Finally, by modulating the operations of these input devices, we demonstrate bit rates of up to 50 bits per second over the human body.

In this poster, we show for the first time that commodity devices can be used to generate wireless data transmissions that are confined to the human body. Specifically, we show that commodity input devices such as fingerprint sensors and touchpads can be used to transmit information to only wireless receivers that are in contact with the body.