Wireless Trends & Emerging Applications in IoT & Wearables

Wireless technology and research have been evolving over the past decade to address more and more systems level challenges and a greater focus on how wireless can enable new experiences. Although traditional measures of capacity are still relevant and important, and clearly a focus of many "5G' related research, there are also new requirements emerging in terms of latency, power consumption, cost, small form-factors, and application specific quality measures. In addition, with the emergence of machine-to-machine communications, wireless systems are no longer limited by the human factor of data consumption which creates new requirements for both the wireless protocols as well as applications which may, for example, be doing analytics on the data received over the wireless links. In this presentation, I'll cover some high-level trends happening in wireless communications, and specifically talk about emerging applications and opportunities for wireless in the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable application space. Although there have been many people asking "Is wireless research dead?', I'll try to motivate why this is not the case, but also suggest that the research challenges are changing and there is a greater need to take a more systems level and multi-disciplinary approach to the research.
Jeffrey R. Foerster joined Intel in 2000 and is currently a Principal Engineer and Director of Emerging Connectivity Solutions in the Wireless Communications Research Lab in Intel Labs. He currently leads a team focused on emerging WBAN, WPAN, and WLAN technologies for wearables, IoT, and mobile connectivity. Previously, he led an internal research team and a multi-year university research consortium, co-funded by Cisco and Verizon, on Video Aware Wireless Networks, which included topics on joint source-channel coding, video quality estimation, adaptive streaming, and end-to-end video network optimizations. His past research has included Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology and related regulations, 60 GHz system design, and wireless displays. Jeff has published over 30 papers including journals, magazine, and conferences, and has been an invited panelist and presenter at several conferences. Jeff is also a member of the FCC Technical Advisory Committee, and sits on an internal Intel Corporate Research Council which manages university research funding. Prior to joining Intel, he worked on Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) systems and standards. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, San Diego, where his thesis focused on adaptive interference suppression and coding techniques for CDMA systems. Jeff is a Fellow of the IEEE.