The Smart City Living Lab Wi-SUN Challenge: Empowering Innovators

The Smart City Living Lab Wi-SUN Challenge is a dynamic platform that aims to support hardware innovators, start-ups, and academic institutions in developing workable prototypes utilizing the Wi-SUN RF mesh. The challenge encourages them all to harness the potential of the Wi-SUN network. By doing so, they contribute to smarter cities, efficient utilities, and innovative healthcare solutions. With over three hundred members across forty-six countries, the Wi-SUN Alliance drives interoperability and standardization in IoT applications. This challenge aligns with this greater vision.

The thematic areas eligible for the scheme covered domains such as smart cities, energy, water utilities, healthcare, smart parking, metering, smart streetlighting, and more. Focus areas included edge intelligence, predictive maintenance, battery-powered smart utility solutions, etc. We received an overwhelming number of submissions, a total of 266 which consisted of a diverse pool - students, researchers, working professionals, entrepreneurs, and startups—all eager to tackle real-world problems using Wi-SUN technologies. All the teams provided not only their ideas but also detailed plans for executing their projects including budgetary and component requirements.

A thorough screening process was undertaken by our esteemed judge panel – Dr. Aftab Hussain, Mrs. Anuradha Vattem - Lead Architect from IIITH, Venkatesh Narasimhan, and Srinivasa Dukkipati from Silicon Labs, which took place in three stages, the first based on the relevance to the smart city applications, the second based on their understanding on sensors and cloud connectivity, and the final round, which was an online interview round designed to check their capability to ready their concept in the stipulated amount of time, their experience with IoT applications and their understanding on Wi-SUN.

Our expert panel narrowed down the submissions, after thorough review and discussions and announced the chosen Top 10. Consisting of six teams from startups and four from college students, the ideas were innovative and fresh. These finalists, spanning four Indian States, are poised to make a difference with their ideas. Ranging from smart dustbins, particulate matter monitoring devices, and real-time water quality monitoring systems to warehouse management bots and real-time soil monitoring, they have it all covered.

In the first week of August, a one-day workshop will have been planned for the ten finalists to give them hands-on experience with the LFN (Limited Function Node) HW kit and SW development platform, following which the participants will begin the development of the application.

Once the concepts are built, in the final leg of their journey, the ten teams will evaluate the PoC at the Living lab using the existing Wi-SUN backbone network in the IIIT Hyderabad campus.

The winners would then be finalized by the panel of experts followed by the award ceremony where the winners will take home grand cash prizes worth Rs. 8 lakhs (9.6 k in USD).

The Wi-SUN Challenge is a collaborative effort between IIITH Smart City Living Lab and Silicon Labs, as part of their campus-wide Wi-SUN network initiative. The Wi-SUN Challenge has been a tremendous success so far. However, this is not just a competition—it is a catalyst for real-world impact. It is about working together and striving to make substantial changes in the world around us.