Title: Wireless Communications for the Industrial Internet of Things

Date: 3:00PM, Nov 12

Venue: Haiyun Admin Building C505

Abstract:  The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is ushering in a fourth wave of the industrial revolution, and will have the power to transform energy, manufacturing and healthcare. While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of emerging IIoT applications, primarily due to the rigidity of access to wired infrastructure. Wireless technology, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionise the industry by introducing a completely new class of applications.While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the metering and monitoring domains, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control and protection operations are concerned, due to their high latencies and insufficient reliability. For current high performance networked control, fiber-optic wired networks are exclusively used as their latencies are significantly lower than those in wireless networks. Wireless systems, however, provide flexible access, are easy and cost-effective to deploy, extend and maintain.

In order to facilitate wireless connectivity in emerging mission critical applications, it is imperative to develop new theories, mechanisms and technologies for wireless networks with consistently ultralow latencies and ultrahigh reliability. 

In this talk I will present the state-of-the art wireless technologies for industrial internet use cases and outline the gap between their current and required performance. I will describe the main standardisation activities to overcome this gap and recent results in wireless communications research at Sydney University Centre of Excellence in Telecommunications.

Biography

Professor Branka Vucetic currently leads the Centre of Excellence for Telecommunications at the University. She is recognised internationally for her leadership in general electrical and information engineering research, teaching and strategic development. She is a Fellow of IEEE which recognises her contributions in channel coding theory and its applications in wireless communication systems.  She has made international impact by her publications, research training, academic and industry collaborations. This year she was awarded the position of ARC Laureate Professor, being the only one in engineering this year.

Professor Vucetic was recently awarded one of China's top honours - the Chinese Government Friendship Award. The award is given by the China’s central government for continuous and sustained cooperation in education, science, technology, management, sports and culture. Professor Vucetic's received the award for her long-term cooperation with Chinese tertiary institutions and her contribution to furthering education, science and technology.

Professor Vucetic was also named as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering an independent body of 800 eminent Australian engineers and scientists.