September 2022

IIITH Smart City Living Lab in partnership with Silicon Labs, a leader in secure, intelligent wireless technology, today launched a campus-wide Wi-SUN network to enable research and solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities. Wi-SUN is an open-standard protocol enabling interoperable solutions through open source software with multi-layer security. Wi-SUN will enable utilities, municipalities, and other enterprises to deploy long-range, low-power wireless mesh networks connecting thousands of IoT nodes.

 IIITH Smart City Living Lab is setup as an initiative of MEITY (Ministry of Electronics & IT) , National Cities Mission, and Gov of Telangana, with knowledge support from EBTC (European Business Technology Council). Silicon Labs, Intel, and Saint Gobain are the other three founding corporate partners. Professor Ramesh Loganathan said, “The Smart City Living Lab, a year old now,  is already a testbed for various start-ups and research. IIITH’s campus consists of sensor networks monitoring different verticals such as water, energy, air pollution, solar generation, etc. as well as a strong standards based data network”.

 The Wi-SUN network will add to the existing modes of sensor communications including Wi-Fi and LORA. Wi-SUN needs no towers or expensive communications infrastructure, and allows sensors to connect easily to the cloud. The  project at IIITH will convert all 100 streetlights on campus to Wi-SUN smart streetlights, to build a dense and steady network to allow other sensors such as energy meters, indoor deployments etc., anywhere on campus to utilize these lights as router nodes to send sensor data. 

 “Industry-academia partnerships, like the Smart City Living Lab are critical to the growth of the IoT in India,” said Ross Sabolcik, SVP of Industrial and Commercial at Silicon Labs. “Together, we can solve some of the country’s most complex challenges and improve quality of life for all with wireless connectivity. This Wi-SUN network launch is an important milestone that will be the foundation for future smart city applications.”

This project is the foundation for future research study into the Wi-SUN network and will also include challenges for start-ups to build solutions for smart cities using the Wi-SUN network to help take smart city innovations to cost-effective deployment.