We gladly accepted the invitation to participate in The First BioSense Scientific Workshop, held on February 18-20, 2015 at the BioSense Center, University of Novi Sad, Serbia; An internal event gathering 3 on-going FP7 projects (InnoSense, EOPOWER and ADVANTAGE).
The event was faithful to the invitation, gathering “eminent scientists, researchers and industry representatives from around the World, aiming to stimulate cross-fertilization and exchange of ideas in complex technological challenges. The workshop will be a unique opportunity to get acquainted with the latest achievements in information and communication technologies for sustainability and eco-innovation, and to address questions of interest both to the scientific as well as to the industrial community.”
Our particular interest was in the parallel session on Recent Trends in Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communications. To no surprise, out of 11 presentations, 2 were on energy efficiency and 7–yes, seven–on random access. We presented our collaboration with CTTC regarding the use of tree-splitting algorithms and distributed queues (instead of aloha-based solutions) to address contention in the random access for cases where the attempt rate is bigger than 1, which translates to too many collisions. Our presentation titled “Goodbye, Aloha”, after 5 slotted Aloha-related presentations, could have been seen as mere provocation, but we actually received very constructive feedback on how to continue our work.
I close this post by referring to the work by G. Corrales, C. Stefanovic and P. Popovski that was presented during the workshop, “How Many Smart Meters can be Deployed in a GSM cell?” an interesting approach to re-engineer GSM networks for the support of simultaneous, low-data rate, M2M communications in the order of 10 000 devices per cell.
