ICNC 2015 Panel. Internet of Things: Technical Challenges and Business Opportunities. 18 th Feb., 2015

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1 ICNC 2015 Panel Internet of Things: Technical Challenges and Business Opportunities 18 th Feb., 2015 Dr. Nikhil Balram President & CEO, Ricoh Innovations Corporation, Menlo Park, CA Visiting prof. of vision science, University of California, Berkeley Guest prof. of design & innovation, IIT Gandhinagar Adjunct prof. of electrical engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

2 Ricoh Innovations Corporation (RIC) Subsidiary of Ricoh Company Ltd. global company with revenues of ~$22B in FY13 Headquartered in Silicon Valley for 25 years With a subsidiary in India since Feb Ricoh Innovations Pvt. Ltd. (RIPL) Over 800 US patents granted or pending Mission Development of innovative technologies Creation of new businesses worldwide applying advanced information technology Based on three key pillars: 1. The Infinite Network long term vision of all things and all people connected all the time 2. The Deep Innovation model seamlessly combining Technology, User, Business insights 3. Hybrid go to market model horizontal technology platforms with vertical go to market 1

3 Internet of Things The Hype & The Reality Gartner 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Relabeling all kinds of current businesses as IoT creates a narrative of a market size of trillions of dollars But what we should care about are the truly new opportunities? 2

4 Real Internet of Things (RIoT) Challenges & Opportunities In a future where all things are connected all the time, there will be an infinite number of intelligent networked sensors generating data that will be communicated, aggregated and analyzed continuously to make the right choices at the right times Big innovations are needed at every level from the basic sensor elements all the way up to high level real time predictive analytics 3

5 Intelligent Network Sensing The Big Challenge The BIG challenge is powering these sensors replacing 1 billion batteries a year is not viable or scalable These sensors need to be selfpowered, i.e., they need to harvest energy from their environment Solar power is efficient but not suitable for indoor and embedded applications What is a potential source of energy that is pervasive indoors? 4

6 Harvesting Energy From Wi Fi Harvesting energy from the 2.4GHz RF band is a viable option for powering Intelligent Networked Sensors (INS)* There are a large number of potential opportunities for selfpowered INS *See papers by Dr. Jonathan Hull et. alt. from RIC 5

7 Application Example: Enterprise Asset Tracking What you cannot track, you cannot measure, and what you cannot measure, you cannot optimize. Market size $18.9 billion Present solutions have high TCO due to significant manual effort required (either for data collection, or maintenance) Reliably harvesting RF energy creates a perpetual energy source for asset tags and helps significantly reduce TCO RF energy harvesting works in most indoor conditions but it is challenging due to very low levels of energy available Industrial manufacturing 4% Retail and hospitality 16% Projected Enterprise Asset Tracking Market Transport and Logistics 18% Government 21% Healthcare 36% IT Services 5% 6

8 RIoT Example: Universal Asset Tracking System* All assets to be tracked are tagged with a Smart Tag that is powered by a Wi-Fi source and can be instantly located using BLE Customer Enterprise Workflows TCP/IP Asset Manager Software TCP/IP BLEenabled devices Smart Tag (RF Harvesting) RF Energy Wi-Fi access point Smart Tag (Zero Maintenance hardware platform) Band aid sized asset tracking tag for universal tagging Wi Fi energy harvesting to eliminate battery replacement Supports real time asset tracking for mission critical assets Ability to integrate sensors for environment monitoring Asset Manager (Scalable software platform): Cloud based software platform with multi tier architecture for workflow flexibility APIs for easy integration into existing enterprise backend systems Mobile app to get asset id & location directly from tags *Concept only not a commercially available product 7

9 Some Challenges and Opportunities New ultra low power circuits for sensing, computing and communication to make best use of the harvested power New ultra low power communication protocols for dense networks to handle congestion and interference without traditional retransmit type of approach Interoperability between different sensor networks Workflows and data analytics built on top of a dense fabric of intelligent network sensors New service business models INSaaS Balancing security, privacy and ROI 8

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