Jeroen Famaey

University of Antwerp | UA · Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

Tiny battery-less Internet of Things (IoT) devices that depend on the harvested energy from their environment provide a promising alternative for a sustainable IoT vision. These devices use small capacitors as energy storage, which together with the unpredictable and dynamic harvesting environment results in intermittent on-off behavior of the devi...

Radio Environmental Maps (REMs) are a powerful tool for enhancing the cognitive awareness of various communication and networked agents by providing localized radio measurements of an environment of interest. Generating REMs is a laborious undertaking, especially in complex 3-Dimensional (3D) environments, such as indoors. To address this issue, we...

Deploying low maintenance and long-life systems is an important requirement of emerging commercial Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. Such systems can be envisioned in which the connected devices are powered by energy harvested from ambient sources and stored in long-lifetime capacitors rather than short-lived and polluting batteries. However, due...

The NanoCoCoA 2021 special section covers important and influential topics targeting the enablement of a number of disruptive applications including in-body communication, software-defined metamaterials and metasurfaces, wireless robotic materials, and on-chip communication.. This encapsulates a broad range of expertise, ranging from nanoscale hard...

With the emerging deployment of Internet of Things devices, the industry is moving toward batteryless, maintenance-free, and sustainable solutions. Energy harvesting from ambient sources becomes crucial to support the uninterrupted execution of such applications. We choose the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh network to analyze a batteryless node us...

The 2nd ACM International Workshop on Nanoscale Computing, Communication, and Applications (ACM NanoCoCoA 2021) will be held in conjunction with the 19th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2021) on November 17, 2021. The twofold mission of this workshop is to increase the visibility of nanoscale computing, communication, ne...

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is emerging as an Internet of Things (IoT) technology that effectively connects small devices and sensors. It can enable many smart building use cases such as automation and control, environmental condition monitoring, and indoor location services. The BLE mesh standard provides a friendship feature to support Low Power N...

Tiny energy harvesting battery-less devices present a promising alternative to battery-powered devices for a sustainable Internet of Things (IoT) vision. The use of small capacitors as energy storage, along with a dynamic and unpredictable harvesting environment, leads these devices to exhibit intermittent on-off behavior. As the traditional comput...

Radio Environmental Maps (REMs) are a powerful tool for enhancing the performance of various communication and networked agents. However, generating REMs is a laborious undertaking, especially in complex 3-Dimensional (3D) environments, such as indoors. To address this issue, we propose a system for autonomous generation of fine-grained REMs of ind...

Software-Defined Metamaterials (SDMs) show a strong potential for advancing the engineered control of electromagnetic waves. As such, they are envisioned to enable a variety of exciting applications, among others in the domains of smart textiles, high-resolution structural monitoring, and sensing in challenging environments. Many of the application...

Full-immersive multiuser Virtual Reality (VR) setups envision supporting seamless mobility of the VR users in the virtual worlds, while simultaneously constraining them inside shared physical spaces through redirected walking. For enabling high data rate and low latency delivery of video content in such setups, the supporting wireless networks will...

While IEEE 802.15.4e Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) networks should be equipped to deal with the hard wireless challenges of industrial environments, the sensor networks are often still limited by the characteristics of the used physical (PHY) layer. Therefore, the TSCH community has recently started shifting research efforts to the support of...

Batteryless Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices need to schedule tasks on very limited energy budgets from intermittent energy harvesting. Creating an energy-aware scheduler allows the device to schedule tasks in an efficient manner to avoid power loss during execution. To achieve this, we need insight in the Worst-Case Energy Consumption (WCEC) of ea...

Today's IoT devices rely on batteries, which offer stable energy storage but contain harmful chemicals. Having billions of IoT devices powered by batteries is not sustainable for the future. As an alternative, batteryless devices run on long-lived capacitors charged using energy harvesters. The small energy storage capacity of capacitors results in...

Contemporary Virtual Reality (VR) setups commonly consist of a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) tethered to a content-generating server. "Cutting the wire" in such setups and going truly wireless will require a wireless network capable of delivering enormous amounts of video data at an extremely low latency. Higher frequencies, such as the millimeter-wav...

Recent developments in nanotechnology herald nanometer-sized devices expected to bring light to a number of groundbreaking applications. Communication with and among nanodevices will be needed for unlocking the full potential of such applications. As the traditional communication approaches cannot be directly applied in nanocommunication, several a...

IEEE 802.11ah is a new sub-GHz Wi-Fi technology that provides several advantages over traditional Wi-Fi such as a higher communication range, enhanced scalability, and lower energy consumption, however at the cost of substantially lower throughput. With the aim of simultaneously benefiting from multiple Wi-Fi technologies, recent proposals suggest...

In the Internet of Things (IoT), thousands of devices can be deployed to acquire data from the environment and provide service to several applications in different fields. In many cases, it is desirable that devices are self-sustainable in terms of energy. Therefore,the research community is exploring the possibility of employing battery-less devic...

IEEE 802.11ah, marketed as Wi-Fi HaLow, is a new sub-1GHz Wi-Fi technology for the Internet of Things (IoT), aiming to address the major challenge of the IoT: providing connectivity among a large number of power-constrained stations deployed over a wide area. In order to achieve this goal, several novel features are introduced in IEEE 802.11ah in b...

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is becoming one of the most promising low power wide area (LPWA) networking technologies. It can support more than 50 000 devices within a cell using licensed spectrum. NB-IoT provides low energy consumption, reliable connectivity and deep indoor coverage for the device, making it a good candidate for IoT use...

The numerous applications of industrial automation have always posed many challenges for wireless connectivity. In the last decade, IEEE 802.15.4e Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) networks have provided high reliability and low-power operation in such challenging industrial environments. Typically, TSCH networks employ one modulation at the phys...

Nanoscale wireless networks are expected to revolutionize a variety of domains, with significant advances conceivable in in-body healthcare. In healthcare, these nanonetworks will consist of energy-harvesting nanodevices passively flowing through the bloodstream, taking actions at certain locations, and communicating results to more powerful Body A...

Software-defined metamaterials (SDMs) represent a novel paradigm for real-time control of metamaterials. SDMs are envisioned to enable a variety of exciting applications in the domains such as smart textiles and sensing in challenging conditions. Many of these applications envisage deformations of the SDM structure (e.g., rolling, bending, stretchi...

The need for cables with high-fidelity Virtual Reality (VR) headsets remains a stumbling block on the path towards interactive multiuser VR. Due to strict latency constraints, designing fully wireless headsets is challenging, with the few commercially available solutions being expensive. These solutions use proprietary millimeter wave (mmWave) comm...

IEEE 802.11ah is a novel sub-GHz license-free WiFi technology that is of great interest for Smart Cities, primarily due to its long range, low energy consumption, reliability, and ubiquitousness. To guarantee a long lifetime of battery-powered IEEE 802.11ah Mobile Terminals (MTs), network discovery based on beacon listening or active probing should...

Software-Defined Metamaterials (SDMs) show a strong potential for advancing the engineered control of electromagnetic waves. As such, they are envisioned to enable a variety of exciting applications, among others in the domains of smart textiles, high-resolution structural monitoring, and sensing in challenging environments. Many of the application...

The performance of wireless networking approaches degrades under user's mobility. To objectively and reliably establish their performance under mobility, one has to guarantee highly repeatable experimentation with minimized external influences, which is currently a burdensome manual process for 3-dimensional (3D) environments. To address this issue...

While IEEE 802.15.4 and its Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) medium access mode were developed as a wireless substitute for reliable process monitoring in industrial environments, most deployments use a single/static physical layer (PHY) configuration. Instead of limiting all links to the throughput and reliability of a single Modulation and Cod...

Small satellite constellations are an attractive alternative to provide ubiquitous connectivity to Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G machine-type communication (MTC) applications in areas where terrestrial network coverage is limited. In order to provide global coverage using small satellite networks flying in low earth orbit (LEO), a large constella...

Today’s and tomorrow’s networks are becoming increasingly complex and heterogeneous with a large diversity of devices and technologies. To meet growing demand, and support client mobility there is need for intelligent mechanisms like multi-technology load balancing and handovers. Current solutions, like Multipath Transmission Control Protocol (MPTC...

Despite remarkable advances, current augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) applications are a largely individual and local experience. Interconnected AR/VR, where participants can virtually interact across vast distances, remains a distant dream. The great barrier that stands between current technology and such applications is the stringent end-to-...

Software-defined metamaterials (SDMs) represent a novel paradigm for real-time control of metamaterials. SDMs are envisioned to enable a variety of exciting applications in the domains such as smart textiles and sensing in challenging conditions. Many of these applications envisage deformations of the SDM structure (e.g., rolling, bending, stretchi...

With the growth of the number of IoT devices, the need for changing batteries is becoming cumbersome and has a significant environmental impact. Therefore, batteryless and maintenance-free IoT solutions have emerged, where energy is harvested from the ambient environment. Energy harvesting is relevant mainly for the devices that have a low energy c...

The need for cables with high-fidelity Virtual Reality (VR) headsets remains a stumbling block on the path towards interactive multi-user VR. Due to strict latency constraints, designing fully wireless headsets is challenging, with the few commercially available solutions being expensive. These solutions use proprietary millimeter wave (mmWave) com...

Billions of IoT devices are deployed worldwide and batteries are their main power source. However, these batteries are bulky, short-lived and full of hazardous chemicals that damage our environment. Relying on batteries is not a sustainable solution for the future IoT. As an alternative, battery-less devices run on long-lived capacitors charged usi...

Multiple Radio Access Technology (multi-RAT) communication with Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) significantly increases the flexibility of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Location-based services that build upon such a multimodal communication architecture are able to switch to an optimal localization method depending on the constraints...

The Internet of Things (IoT) already connects billions of devices and keeps growing exponentially. These devices are designed to be integrated with industrial machines, home appliances and infrastructures. One such use-case is to build a smart grid management system that relies on demand-response techniques to control the appliances automatically s...

Billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices rely on batteries as the main power source. These batteries are short-lived, bulky and harmful to the environment. Battery-less devices provide a promising alternative for a sustainable IoT, where energy harvested from the environment is stored in small capacitors. This constrained energy storage and the...

The recent Wi-Fi HaLow technology focuses on adopting Wi-Fi for the needs of the Internet of Things. A key feature of Wi-Fi HaLow is the Restricted Access Window (RAW) mechanism that allows an access point to divide the sensors into groups and to assign each group to an exclusively reserved time interval where only the stations of a particular grou...

Low-power wireless mesh networks provide connectivity for a wide range of applications in industrial scenarios. For many years, IEEE 802.15.4e Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) networks have proven their efficiency in such environments, providing high reliability and low-power operation. TSCH networks run on top of one physical (PHY) layer and ar...

Traffic recognition is commonly done using deep packet inspection or packet‐based approaches. However, these methods require the listening device to be part of the network and raise privacy concerns. Traffic recognition models that operate directly at the spectrum level could, for instance, be used for smart spectrum management. To this extent, we...

Software-Defined Metamaterials (SDMs) are envisioned to enable the control of electromagnetic waves at an unprecedented scale. Various SDM applications will require downlink and broadcast-based transmission of control packets from a powered transmitter to energy harvesting nanonodes. The nanonode's communication system is anticipated to be a bottle...

Multi-Radio Access Technology (RAT) IoT devices are able to combine the high coverage of Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) technologies with the higher data-rates of shorter range technologies such as IEEE 802.11ah. In such scenarios, a discovery procedure has to be used for detecting the availability of a IEEE 802.11ah network. Currently, these procedure...

Aside from vast deployment cost reduction, Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (IWSAN) introduce a new level of industrial connectivity. Wireless connection of sensors and actuators in industrial environments not only enables wireless monitoring and actuation, it also enables coordination of production stages, connecting mobile robots...

Rapidly evolving, the Internet of Things imposes new challenges for the developers of wireless networks. Various critical infrastructure monitoring scenarios require fast and reliable alert delivery. In such systems, multiple sensors are entrusted to react to the same emergency event. Thus, it is enough to receive an alert message from any of these...

Location information is among the main enablers of context-aware applications and wireless networks. Practical localization services are able to generate location estimates that are generally erroneous. To maximize its usability and benefits, each location estimate should be leveraged jointly with the corresponding estimate of its localization erro...

The number of connected devices has reached 18 billion in 2017 and this will nearly double by 2022, while also new wireless communication technologies become available. Since these modern devices support the use of multiple communication technologies, efforts have been made to enable simultaneous usage and handovers between the different technologi...

A variety of nanoscale applications require downlink and broadcast-based transmission of control packets from a powered transmitter to energy-harvesting nanonodes with constrained storage capacity. The nanonode's communication system is anticipated to be a bottleneck for such nanonetworks, hence an accurate modeling of its energy consumption is nee...

From the outset, batteries have been the main power source for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, replacing and disposing of billions of dead batteries per year is costly in terms of maintenance and ecologically irresponsible. Since batteries are one of the greatest threats to a sustainable IoT, battery-less devices are the solution to this pro...

Minimizing the energy consumption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is one of the biggest challenges and crucial issues for the future of a sustainable IoT vision. In order to estimate the remaining device lifetime and optimize its energy consumption, it is necessary to have an accurate online view on the consumed energy with minimal overhead. Th...