Intelligent and Sustainable Aerial-Terrestrial IoT Networks (INITIATE)
The ongoing concern of climate change presents challenges for the future. Environmental disasters are expected to endanger millions of lives, causing significant economic damage. To address these challenges, reliable environmental monitoring is required to reduce the effects of these disasters. Aerial network and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) are promising technologies for environmental monitoring, but both present limitations. The INITIATE project will develop a new generation of intelligent, sustainable and ultrareliable air-to-ground IoT networks to address climate change and environmental disasters, through research, innovation, and knowledge sharing on cutting-edge technologies to shape future IoT networks.
Project Aim
The INITIATE project aims to create and proliferate a long-term international, multidisciplinary and cross-sector platform to research and develop a new generation of intelligent, sustainable and ultra-reliable aerial-terrestrial IoT networks. Through strengthened collaborative research, the INITIATE project will significantly contribute to the European competitiveness and leadership in the key sectors such as Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), remote sensing, and environment monitoring with scientific breakthroughs on IoT, AI, aerial networks, wireless power transfer, software-defined networking, and network resource optimisation. The staff members will be exposed to internationally leading research environments, and trained by participating in extensive R&I research and well-planned networking activities at both Europe and global levels, which will enrich their skill sets and have their career perspectives enhanced for improved employability.
Specific Research Objectives
RO1: To thoroughly analyse the limitations and investigate the Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of IoT networks for environment monitoring, and design an integrated and agile aerial-terrestrial IoT network architecture based on software-defined networking (SDN) and AI-powered aerial network deployment strategies.
RO2: To research and develop highly efficient and simultaneous wireless power and information transfer technologies and achieve sustainable communication in the integrated aerial-terrestrial IoT network.
RO3: To research and propose light-weight AI model design approaches and online learning methods for significantly enhancing the integrated aerial-terrestrial IoT network to overcome the challenges of network complexity and reliability.
RO4: To research and propose ultra-reliable and autonomous network management strategies to achieve a robust IoT network with self-organisation and self-healing capabilities.
RO5: To develop a complete and practically deployable INITIATE system by integrating the individual innovations, and evaluate the system via extensive experiments using measurements from real-world scenarios.
WP No.
WP Title
Start Month
End Month
1
Project Planning and Management, Knowledge Sharing, and Impact Activities
1
48
2
Requirement Analysis and System Architecture Design
1
24
3
Simultaneous and Efficient Wireless Power and Information Transfer
6
42
4
Light-Weight AI Models and Online Learning Approaches
1
30
5
Ultra-Reliable and AI-Driven Autonomous Network Management
6
42
6
System Integration, Test, Demonstration, and Evaluation
