Facilitating the Deployment of Next Billion IoT Devices with Distributed Antenna Systems

Tiny IoT devices have shown their utilities in many fields. However, due to the low cost, small form factor, and inherently restricted computation resources, these IoT devices are facing many fundamental challenges such as the power issue, the communication issue, and the security issue when deployed in scale or operated in long-term period. In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of using distributed antenna systems to facilitate the deployment of IoT devices. Specifically, by coherently combining the phase of each antenna in a 3D distributed antenna system, we form an energy ball at the target location where the energy density level is significantly higher than the energy density level at any other locations. We highlight the properties of energy ball and deploy a testbed with over 20 software defined radios. Our preliminary results demonstrate that this energy ball has a great potential to be leveraged to solve many fundamental problems in IoT and enable exciting IoT applications.