# ScienceIoT: Evolution of the Wireless Infrastructure of KREONET
## 5 Evolution of ScienceLoRa towards ScienceIoT
### Accommodating High Performance Access Network  
Recently, research projects based on wireless communication have been actively conducted in the fields of sensor data collection, multimedia data transfer from UAVs, and remote robot control. For example, a research project on smart agriculture is collecting visual data using drones, where 1.55 TB of image data is captured during a flight. Current data transfer from the drone to the research facility takes several hours, including transportation from the data generation field to the laboratory and disk-to-disk copy. To reduce the data collection delay, ScienceIoT has to embrace wireless technologies providing high-speed data transfer. As representative candidates, we introduce two access network technologies: 5G and Wi-Fi. As 5G mobile network technology has rapidly developed, high-performance wireless communication has become available. Although private 5G is mainly implicated in the industrial field as discussed in [23], the advantages of 5G technology such as dedicated coverage, customized service, and dependable communication are commonly demanded by scientific research projects. In addition, a high-level communication performance is also required in research networks due to the data-oriented research paradigm. In this sense, 5G networks provide a very high data rate of up to 20 Gbps and a very low latency of at least 1 ms. Along with the high-performance, the mobile networks are suitable for supporting mobile research devices such as drones monitoring areas of interest and automobiles containing various mobile sensors. To exploit the advantages of 5G, global NRENs are carrying forward various plans for adopting 5G technology into their research networks in terms of technology and policy. In addition, in many countries, some parts of 5G frequency bands are defined to be used for industrial or public purposes. This separation would encourage the research field to use private 5G networks without high operational costs. A private 5G network might be dependently or independently constructed to the commercial 5G network. There are many variants according to which component (e.g., base station, edge server, or core network system) is to be shared between private and commercial networks. From the view of research networks, sharing more components would reduce the capital and operational costs, whereas independent private networks would provide the authority of network configuration and higher security. Figure 17: Comprehensive vision of ScienceIoT. Wi-Fi is a wireless technology based on non-commercial frequency bands. Therefore, NRENs usually exploit Wi-Fi for providing campus-wide Internet connectivity. The most powerful aspect of Wi-Fi is the extremely high availability. In other words, installing a Wi-Fi access point makes a wireless network. The scaling up is easily achieved by binding multiple access points into a LAN. Therefore researchers can build a wireless network in their laboratory or research facility without expertise in networking. In addition, as Wi-Fi has been improved from 802.11a to 802.11 ax (Wi-Fi 6), its data rate and reliability have increased dramatically. Moreover, 802.11 be (Wi-Fi 7), which is a work-in-progress amendment by the Extremely High Throughput (EHT) task group, is expected to provide a maximum throughput of at least 30 Gbps [24]. The main limitation of Wi-Fi is that it does not provide determinism because of the multiple access mechanisms based on contention avoidance. Therefore, it should not be used in situations where some unexpected delay causes a fatal accident. Nevertheless, researchers can use Wi-Fi as an easy-to-use and high-performance wireless network for monitoring laboratory/research facilities and connecting their wireless devices.