National Harbor, MD. The IoT is a topic of interest to the IEEE in general and the EMC Society in particular according to a workshop presented at this week’s EMC+SIPI Symposium. Mike Violette of the IEEE EMC Society began with a presentation describing the IoT and the society’s efforts to further IoT technology. He was followed by Adam Drobot of the IEEE IoT Initiative, who described efforts beyond EMC.
Violette said the goal of the society is to understand, engage, and support. The IoT includes technologies like M2M and touches on 5G, which he described as quite closely coupled to the IoT. A concise definition might be elusive, but Violette described it as a network of items with embedded sensors that communicate over the Internet to perform command and control. He described examples ranging from the Internet of cats to the Internet of bicycles—the latter enabling a bike-sharing application in Beijing.
The IoT, he added, will take advantage of licensed and unlicensed spectrum and will make use of WAN, WLAN, WWLAN (cellular), and even wired connections. But the emphasis will be on wireless, driving up the need for bandwidth.
As for specific initiatives of the EMC Society, Violette said technical committees are focusing on EMC management, measurements, the electromagnetic environment, electromagnetic interference control, high-power electromagnetics, spectrum engineering, low-frequency EMC, computational electromagnetics, signal integrity and power integrity, nanotechnology and advanced materials, and EMC for emerging wireless technologies.
Violette predicted a busy future for symposium attendees and said EMC has an important role to play in the physical layer of the IoT.
Drobot said the IEEE’s IoT initiative is aimed at conquering complexity one step at a time, with 22 IEEE societies joining the effort. He described the IoT as a fast-growing technical area that touches almost all verticals of the world economy, with a CAGR of more than 20% in the commercial marketplace. The driver, he said, is the deep digitization of everything we design and deploy today with connectivity extending from local to global.
“The greatest gains will come from how we refactor the design of personal and infrastructure systems that are pervasive and affect us all,” he concluded.
Other workshop topics included “Shared Spectrum Metrology,” “Vulnerability of Wireless Systems to (Intentional) EMI,” “Test Challenges of Smart Antenna Systems,” and “The FCC and the Internet of Things.”
If you missed the workshop you can access it at the EMC+SIPI 2017 Online Symposium.
