Years have passed by since the Internet of Things (IoT) has appeared on the scene, becoming one of the major research and industrial subject in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) arena. Its pervasiveness today has assumed dimensions rarely achieved in the past by other ICT themes, so as to raise the doubt whether it is more a “trendy” term, speculatively ridden to increase the attention on studies and products around mature technologies, rather than a real element of technological discontinuity with respect to the past.
This doubt comes also from the fact that, in spite of its huge success, what IoT really represents is not completely clear yet. Often, solutions and paradigms that rely on very dissimilar technologies are included under the common umbrella of the IoT. All this noise around the phenomenon has increased the confusion so that it has become necessary to shed light on it and come to a definition, shared by the whole community, of what IoT is and what is not.
This talk aims at (i) presenting the evolution of the IoT paradigm and highlighting how the emerging computing and communication paradigms (e.g., 5G networking, Social Networks, Cloud/Fog/Edge computing, etc.) are transforming the IoT in terms of architectures, technologies and protocols, and (ii) giving a modern definition of the IoT phenomenon by pointing out the differences between IoT and the technologies often confused with it (Sensors, RFID, M2M, etc).
The Internet of Things (IoT) for terrestrial deployments is a major part of the next generation 5G wireless systems. However, there are many use cases such as monitoring remote areas, terrain monitoring including North and South poles, intelligent global transport management, etc. which require a more global, scalable, flexible and resilient solution.
In this talk, a novel architecture of the Internet of Space Things (IoST) is introduced stemming from the fast development and application of newly designed CubeSats with compact hybrid THz/Ku/X band frequency transceivers and antenna arrays. The proposed IoST architecture is based on THz band communication for achieving terabit-per-second throughputs among CubeSats.
Furthermore, software-defined networking (SDN), and network function virtualization (NFV) have been incorporated to effectively separate the abstraction of functionalities from the hardware by decoupling the data forwarding plane from the control plane, such separation is of prime importance given the limited onboard processing on CubeSats. Additionally, key parameters in the constellation design including the coverage footprint and number of CubeSats as well as orbital planes, etc. are investigated for feasibility and deployment studies at different altitudes in the exosphere orbit (800 km and above).
Through the new IoST architecture, a much broader spatial and service domain with greatly enhanced efficacy can be served than with the traditional IoT solutions.
