Description: Techno-economic forecasts indicate that in the coming years wireless M2M communication will become massive, connecting tens of billions devices. Wireless chips have grown in capability and power efficiency, while shrinking in size and cost. Wireless M2M networks are instrumental to manage the complexity of tracking, fleet, and asset management. The industrial sector can widely apply M2M in monitoring and control of processes and equipment. The M2M showcase is the smart grid: the evolved power grid where a rich information flow is used to balance the electricity production (e. g. windmills), distribution, storage, and consumption (e. g. large industrial capacities).

The characteristic of the M2M traffic and performance requirements are very different from the ones defined for the phones, tablets and other human-driven services that are dominant in wireless cellular networks. For example, the data size for an M2M connection can be rather small, comparable to the size of the signaling overhead, which requires a careful interplay between the protocol design and the transmission parameters. Furthermore, there may be applications that do not require high data rate, but high percentage of delivery of their data chunks.
This is a 5-day course in which the following topics will be covered:
• System requirements and architectures for M2M communication
• Traffic characteristics and performance requirements for M2M traffic
• Methods for transmission of short data packets
• Radio access protocols and scheduling algorithms for M2M traffic
• Overview of the 3GPP standardization process related to M2M or Machine-Type Communication (MTC)
• Analysis of the existing systems and their support for M2M (GSM/GPRS, WiFi, Zigbee, Wireless M-Bus, RFID)
• Smart Grid Communications as a case study.



Prerequisites:
Fundamentals of networking and protocols, digital communications, stochastic processes, and queueing theory.

Motivation for this course:
This course was running in 2013 and it was very successful, with a very positive feedback from the students. Wireless M2M is at the moment one of the hottest topics for the upcoming 5G networks. Yet, the requirements posed by M2M require revision of conventional wisdom of wireless protocol design, leading to new research challenges. We know that this is an area of immense interest and there are not yet many courses on the market, such that we expect this PhD course to attract attendants from abroad as well as from the industry. In 2013 we got interest from several participants from Huawei, but in the end they could not travel during the course dates. This time we will make sure to advertise the course well in advance.

Organizer: Prof. Petar Popovski, e-mail: petarp@es.aau.dk

Lecturers: Prof. Petar Popovski, Dr. Cedomir Stefanovic, Dr. Nuno Pratas, Dr. Jimmy Nielsen, Dr. Dong Min Kim.

ECTS: 3

Time: 2-5 November, 2015

Place: Aalborg University

Zip code: 9220

City: Aalborg

Number of seats: 30

Deadline: 12 October, 2015