Internet of Things Management and Application Platform with Broadband Wireless (IMAP)

The proposed project focuses on the research and development of Internet of Things (IoT) Management Platform, IoT Solution architecture and applications. Even though the wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies like Zigbee and 6LoWPAN are relatively mature, they only provide communications to IoT devices (e.g. sensors, controllers). The management and application enabling solutions are missing or only in prototype quality (i.e. not reliable, not scalable, and lack of security). With the progress in the international standard organizations (3GPP, ETSI), it is the right time for ASTRI to develop open platform to enable IoT applications based on standard architecture. In addition, with the knowledge learned from the seed project, the project team has identified two IoT applications with great market demand: solar street light management system and green energy management system. Therefore, the proposed project will focus on developing a commercial grade end to end management platform and the two aforementioned applications. Through industry engagement, the project team noticed that green energy (mainly solar and wind power) powered devices have great synergies with IoT, which is best illustrated by Solar powered street lights deployments. Every street light is a standalone entity with its own solar panel and battery (i.e. no wires attached) and thus cannot be controlled and monitored remotely. Using WSN technologies, the solar street lights can form a local area sensor network. With an IoT gateway device and the wireless broadband access such as LTE, the solar street lights can be managed and controlled remotely by the IoT management platform. The direct benefits of the IoT management platform would be the capability to monitor the street light components (such as solar panel, batteries, power, current etc) and to control the street lights (for examples, on/off, dimming etc) remotely. In addition, the IoT solution can bring impacts in terms of energy savings, low construction cost, environment protection and low operational and maintenance cost. In fact, when this project is completed, similar applications such as environment monitoring, video surveillance, river management, water quality monitoring etc can be developed quickly once the interested industry partners are identified. In summary, this project will deliver: i) a commercial IoT management platform to provide management capability to different types of IoT devices flexibly and reliably; ii) solar/wind powered device management applications (solar street light management and green energy device management), based on the IoT management platform.