There is a continuous need to design and develop wireless technologies to meet the increasing demands for high-speed wireless data transfer to incorporate advanced intelligent transport systems. Different wireless technologies are continuously evolving including short-range and long-range (WiMAX, LTE, and 5G) cellular standards. These emerging technologies can considerably enhance the operational performance of communication between vehicles and road-side infrastructure. This paper analyzes the performance of cellular-based long-term evolution (LTE) and 5GTN (5G Test Network) in pilot field measurements (i.e., vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure) when delivering road weather and traffic information in real-time environments. Measurements were conducted on a test track operated and owned by the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), Finland. The results showed that 5GTN outperformed LTE when exchanging road weather and traffic data messages in V2V and V2I scenarios. This comparison was made by mainly considering bandwidth, throughput, packet loss, and latency. The safety critical messages were transmitted at a transmission frequency of 10 Hz. The performance of both compared technologies (i.e., LTE and 5GTN) fulfilled the minimum requirements of the ITS-Assisted Road weather and traffic platform to offer reliable communication for enhanced road traffic safety. The field measurement results also illustrate the advantage of cellular networks (LTE and 5GTN) with a clear potential to use it heterogeneously in future field tests with short-range protocols, e.g., IEEE 802.11p.

VANETs (Vehicular Ad hoc Networks) operating in conjunction with road-side infrastructure connecting road-side infrastructure are an emerging field of wireless communication technology in the vehicular communication’s domain. For VANETs, the IEEE 802.11p-based ITS-G5 is one of the key standards for communication globally. This research work integrates the ITS-G5 with a cellular-based 5G Test Network (5GTN). The resulting advanced heterogeneous Vehicular Network (VN) test-bed works as an effective platform for traffic safety between vehicles and road-side-infrastructure. This test-bed network provides a flexible framework to exploit vehicle-based weather data and road observation information, creating a service architecture for VANETs that supports real-time intelligent traffic services. The network studied in this paper aims to deliver improved road safety by providing real-time weather forecast, road friction information and road traffic related services. This article presents the implementation of a realistic test-bed in Northern Finland and the field measurement results of the heterogeneous VANETs considering the speed of vehicle, latency, good-put time and throughput. The field measurement results have been obtained in a state-of-the-art hybrid VANET system supporting special road weather services. Based on field measurement results, we suggest an efficient solution for a comprehensive hybrid vehicular networking infrastructure exploiting road weather information.

A bibliometric analysis was conducted to examine research on in-body communication. This study aimed to assess the research growth in different countries, identify influential authors for potential international collaboration, investigate research challenges, and explore future prospects for in-body communication. A total of 148 articles written in English from journals and conference proceedings were gathered from the Scopus database. These articles cover the period from 2006 until August 2023. VOS Viewer 1.6.19 and Tableau Cloud were used to analyze the data. The analysis reveals that research on in-body communication has shown fluctuations but overall tends to increase. The United States, Finland, and Japan were identified as the leading countries (top three) in terms of publication quantity, while researchers from Norway, Finland, and Morocco received the highest number of citations. The University of Oulu in Finland has emerged as a productive institution in this field. Collaborative research opportunities exist with the countries mentioned above or with authors who have expertise in this topic. The dominant research topic within this field pertains to ultra-wideband (UWB) technology. One of the future challenges in this field is the exploration of optical wireless communication (OWC) as a potential communication medium for in-body devices, such as electronic devices implanted in the human body. This includes improving performance to meet the requirements for in-body communication devices. Additionally, this paper provides further insights into the progress of research on OWC for in-body communication conducted in our laboratory.

We introduce the concept of cognitive wireless mesh network, named CogMesh, in order to meet the future needs of ubiquitous wireless communications. CogMesh is not a concept that simply applies cognitive functionalities into traditional wireless mesh networks. Instead, it aims to enable a uniform service platform by seamlessly integrating heterogenous wireless networks through the utilization of advanced cognitive and adaptive technologies under a mesh structure. The context based reasoning, policy and role based control model, and distributed trust and security mechanism are applied in CogMesh to establish a flexible, reliable, scalable and adaptive wireless network in complex wireless environments. It serves as a model to inspire the design of future wireless networks.

The light-based Internet of things (LIoT) concept defines nodes that exploit light to (a) power up their operation by harvesting light energy and (b) provide full-duplex wireless connectivity. In this paper, we explore the LIoT concept by designing, implementing, and evaluating the communication and energy harvesting performance of a LIoT node. The use of components based on printed electronics (PE) technology is adopted in the implementation, supporting the vision of future fully printed LIoT nodes. In fact, we envision that as PE technology develops, energy-autonomous LIoT nodes will be entirely printed, resulting in cost-efficient, flexible and highly sustainable connectivity solutions that can be attached to the surface of virtually any object. However, the use of PE technology poses additional challenges to the task, as the performance of these components is typically considerably poorer than that of conventional components. In the study, printed photovoltaic cells, printed OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) as well as printed displays are used in the node implementation. The dual-mode operation of the proposed LIoT node is demonstrated, and its communication performance in downlink and uplink directions is evaluated. In addition, the energy harvesting system’s behaviour is studied and evaluated under different illumination scenarios and based on the results, a novel self-operating limitation aware algorithm for LIoT nodes is proposed.