At the end of the course the students will be able to:
-anlyze and design complex telecommunication systems based on Internet of Things
-understand and apply complex communication technologies at the very heart of IoT systems
-design communication networks of tiny and constrained devices to enable IoT aplication and services
-design IoT systems interconnected with the Internet

1 - Knowledge and understanding

Students will learn how to:
-Analyze complex communication technologies for IoT systems
-Analyze application layer protocols for the IoT
-Analyze management platforms for the IoT
-Identify IoT system components and their relations
-Use operative systems for the IoT
-Use prototyping platfomrs for the IoT

2 - Applying knowledge and understanding

Students will be able to:
-Dimension and optimie the energy consumption of sensor nodes
-Evaluate the performance of communication technologies for the IoT
-Evaluate the perormance of application layer protocols for the IoT
-Evaluate the perormance of management platforms for the IoT
-Develop simple applications based on IoT

3 - Making judgements

Students will learn to:
-Understand the fundamental tradeoff that govern the energy management of battery-operated sensor nodes
-Identify how the fundamental system limitations impact the design of the IoT systems
-Recognize the design space and its degrees of freedom that can be exploited to define communication technologies for the IoT

4 - Communication

Students will learn to:

-describe complex network technologies at different levels of detail

The course will provide the basics on the four major building blocks of the Internet of Things: the reference hardware, the communication technologies, the management platforms and the data storage/processing solutions. The course will start off by overviewing the most common hardware components of sensor nodes, and will then move to addressing the challenges which have to be faced to interconnect and manage such tiny devices. In this field, low power short rannge and long range communication technologies will be reviewd. Finally, the course will describe the main features and requirements of management platform commonly used to orchestrate IoT systems.

Program at a Glance

1-Introduction: the vision of ambient intelligence, application examples, enabling Technologies (Sensor Networks, RFID), networking Building Blocks and Abstractions

2-Hardware Components & Abstractions: sensor node hardware architectures, energy consumption and energy harvesting models for sensor nodes

3-Communication technologies for the Internet of Things long range solutions: evolution of the mobile radio network to support IoT traffic (EC-GSM, LTE-M, NB-IoT), examples of Low Power Wide Area Networks (SogFox, LoraWAN, Ingenu, Weightless),

4-Communication technologies for the Internet of Things - short range solutions: introduction to capillary network infrastructures, the ZigBee protocol stack (IEEE 802.15.4 PHY/MAC layer, ZigBee Network layer, ZigBee application layer and profiles), 6LowPAN (IPv6 and UDP header compression, the Routing Protocol for Low power lossy networks - RPL)

5-Application layer protocols for the IoT: the Constrained Application Layer Protocol (COAP), the Message Queuing Telemetry (MQTT)

6-Radio Frequency Identification: application Scenarios, the Physical Layers of RFID (operation band, transmission fundamentals), Collision Arbitration Standards and Solutions (Tree-based arbitration, frame-aloha based arbitration, the Q-Algorithm, performance evaluation of arbitration protocols)

7-Hands-On Activities: operating Systems for wireless sensor networks (TinyOS, Contiki), management and prototyping platforms (ThingSpeak, NodeRed)

No hard prerequisite.

Preferred background on:

-networking fundamentals

-basic software engineering

The students will be evaluated through a written exam on the topics of the course (75%) and a project activity (25%) leveraging the software technologies presented during classess and practical exercises. Project activity is not mandatory which means that students can decide to do only the written exam; in that case, the maximum reachable grade will saturate to 25/30. The project activity can provide up to additional 7/30 points. 30 cum laude will be assigned when the total score is greater or equal 31.

The written exam includes three exercises and a set of questions on the topics of the course. The students may refer to the course web site to check for templates and sample exams from past year's editions of the course.

The project activity will deal with the design of applications and networking solutions for the Internet of Things using the software tools presented during classes and practical exercises sessions. The project activity can be carried out in groups of maximum 2 students. Project requirements and project proposals will be disseminated to students approximately one month and half after the course kick off (beginning of May).

The students will have to prove in the written exam:
-to have clearly understood and acquired to the topics of the course
-to be bale to qualitatively assess all the building blocks of a IoT system (hardware, communication technologies, management platforms and data storage/processing)
-to be able to assess the energy consumption of IoT devices
-to be able to dimension and optimize IEEE 802.15.4 networks
-to be able to evaluate the performances of RFID arbitration systems based on Frame ALOHA and binary trees
-to have acquired and understood the working details of short range (ZigBee, 6LowPAN) and long range (LoraWAN, NB-IoT) communication technologies for the IoT
-to have acquired and understood the working details of IoT application layer protocols (COAP, MQTT)

The students will have to prove in the project activity:
-to be able to manage the reference software (TinyOS, Contiki, Node-Red, Thingspeak)
-to be able to build up working IoT application or networking solutions leveraging the aforementioned software
-to be able to produce clear and comprehensive documentaion describing the developed project

The course web site makes available: lecture/exercises slides, targeted readings (technical papers, standards, survey) on the course topics, coding examples to play with operative systems for wireless sensor networks