The story of this book started almost exactly five years ago when we submitted a
proposal “to establish a world-class Center of Excellence for Energy-Efficient
Electronics Systems in the United Arab Emirates.” The submitted proposal itself
was the culmination of almost one year of work with our academic colleagues,
university administrators, industry sponsors, and local stakeholders. This preparatory work involved a few UAE-wide workshops, a competitive solicitation for proposals, and many long meetings to get all the stars aligned on an initiative that was first-of-a-kind in the UAE context. Little did we know back then that the Center of Excellence we were proposing would be one of the world’s pioneering
multi-university research centers in the now red-hot field of the Internet of Things
(IoT). Indeed, our proposal had been submitted and the Center of Excellence
established a few years before the leading consulting companies and top corporate
strategists of the world started publishing their exponential predictions about the
market and business opportunities of the Internet of Things: the billions upon
billions of connected devices and trillions upon trillions of US dollars in monetary
opportunity
This book is devoted to providing an up-to-date account of the research work
that has been conducted under the ACE4 S program. The content of this book
comprises 20 chapters organized in five parts that are meant to address the various
aspects of the IoT physical layer from novel materials and sensors to system
demonstrators along with their hardware security. .