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Call for Papers

In the last few years, wireless sensors and mobile technologies have experienced a tremendous upsurge. Advances in hardware design and micro-fabrication have made it possible to potentially embed sensing and communication devices in every object, from banknotes to bicycles, leading to the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT). It is expected that physical objects in the near future will create an unprecedented network of interconnected physical things able to communicate information about themselves and/or their surroundings and also capable of interacting with the physical environment where they operate. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology has now reached a good level of maturity and is one of the main enablers for the IoT vision: notable WSN application examples include environmental monitoring, geology structural monitoring, smart grid and household energy metering. The basic differences between WSN and IoT are the number of devices, that is expected to be very large for IoT, and their capability of seamlessly communicating via the Internet Protocol, that will make IoT technology pervasive.

The above mentioned applications require the collection and the subsequent analysis of large amounts of data, which are to be sent through suitable routing protocols to some data collection point(s). One of the main problems of IoTs is thus related to the foreseen large number of devices: if this number will keep increasing, and all signs point toward this direction, the amount of data to be managed by the network will become prohibitive. Further issues are due to the constrained nature of IoT devices in terms of limited energy resources (devices are often battery operated) and to the fact that data transmission is their main source of energy consumption. This, together with the fact that IoT nodes are required to remain unattended (and operational) for long periods of time, poses severe constrains on their transmitting capabilities.

CHALLENGES AHEAD

The trends discussed above entails quite a few challenges that go beyond WSN technology. These include the design of micro protocol stacks able to natively provide Internet connectivity in an efficient manner, the design of communication architectures that scale up to billions of communicating devices, the design of novel protocols that make embedded object extremely energy efficient, driving their operation toward self-sufficiency through the use of advanced energy scavenging techniques, the design of advanced distributed compression schemes to reduce the amount of traffic that embedded object will have to transmit through the standard Internet network, thus reducing the communication burden for the Internet network.

AIM OF THE WORKSHOP

Our workshop is intended to fostering the discussion on the above technical issues, in particular focusing on the design of architectural and protocol components for the energetically sustainable internetworking of the IoT. Our aim is that of continuing the discussion initiated with the past edition of the workshop, steering the focus toward energetically self-sustainable systems.

Guidelines for Prospective Authors

This workshop is intended to be inclusive and attracting theoretical as well as applied research papers. Prospective authors are encouraged to submit original and unpublished contributions including focused research work and showing tangible benefits as well as the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, approaches or methodologies. All papers will be reviewed by the IoTech Program Committee for significance, originality, accuracy, and clarity. The paper length is limited to six double column pages. The paper format follows the standard IEEE template for conferences.

NOTE: Submission implies the willingness of at least one author to attend the workshop and present the paper. Accepted papers will be included in the main proceedings of IEEE MASS 2012 and archived in IEEE Xplore.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

• Energy efficient device architectures: emphasis will be given on novel hardware designs, especially exploiting or integrating systems for energy harvesting.

• Energy driven network design: emphasis will be given to papers dealing with self-sufficient devices with energy harvesting capabilities.

• Reference and concrete communication architectures for IoTs: emphasis will be given on the capability of scaling up to a large number of communicating devices.

• Communication protocol suites for energy constrained devices: theoretical investigation, design, implementation and experimental validation.

• Optimization and improvement of standard protocols for specific application domains: e.g., smart energy metering, for their usage within IoT domains.

• Lightweight signal processing techniques for smart objects: e.g., distributed Source Coding, Compressive Sensing, Lossless and lossy compression, etc.

The following topics will be also considered:

• Reference and Concrete Architectures for the Internet of Things.

• New communication paradigms for the Internet of Things.

• Protocol stacks for the communication (e.g., IETF RPL) and the seamless interoperability of resource constrained devices.

• Technologies for the native IPv6 interoperability of constrained communication devices (e.g., 6LowPAN).

• RESTful communication approaches for energy constrained communication devices.

• Lightweight approaches for the description of sensor data (e.g., EXI).

• Lightweight transport protocols for constrained communication devices.

• Enabling technologies for capturing and handling real-world events and information.

• Lightweight signal processing technologies for data analysis and prediction.

• Virtualization of Wireless Sensors or clusters of sensors.

• Hardware architectures for smart communicating objects (e.g., IEEE 802.15.4e).

• Simulators for the Internet of Things.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: August 15, 2012, 23:59 CET

Notification of Acceptance: September 15, 2012

Camera Ready Due: September 30, 2012

Workshop Date: October 11, 2012