Mayo615's Odyssey to France Week 5 Update: The Internet of Things
Channel: Mayo615
Date: 2019-05-01

Hello! 
Welcome to the Week 5 Update of Mayo615’s Odyssey to France. Today I am going to focus on a particularly important technology market, the Internet of Things. IoT is at a strategic inflection point, due to explosive projected market growth and unresolved problems of wireless data throughput and energy-efficiency needs.
The IoT market is projected to grow to 75 Billion devices by 2025. This growth is predicated on very high throughput wireless networks combined with high energy-efficiency which are not yet available.  Existing wireless technologies, including 5G, will not meet this market need. Also the extreme diversity of IoT applications will require both small sensors that operate using minimal energy and bandwidth, and virtual reality applications with very high Gigabit per second data rates and substantial power requirements. For example, Intel estimates that one autonomous vehicle will generate 4 Terabytes of data daily. 
The good news is that through my work evaluating advanced research proposals in IoT, I can report that a solution may already be at the laboratory “proof of concept” stage. 
The proposed solution that is emerging is the development of innovative software-hardware architectures in which all network layers are jointly designed, combining a millimeter wave high-throughput wireless network and a battery-free wireless network into a single integrated wireless solution.

This is no small feat of engineering but it is feasible. There are many challenges to successfully demonstrating a millimeter wave wireless network integrated with the Tesla-like concept of radio-wave backscatter energy harvesting. However, collaboration among universities and large Internet companies’ research units are nearing the demonstration of such a network. The likely horizon for this becoming an industry standard is probably three to five years, with prototype products appearing sooner. 
You can also read my earlier website posts on the Internet of Things on mayo615.com 
That’s my technology update for this week. We look forward to your comments and questions. We will respond to all comments and may feature comments in our update videos. Click here now to SUBSCRIBE