CC* Integration-Large: (BLUE) Software-Defined CyberInfrastructure to enable data-driven smart campus applications

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

A new campus infrastructure called BLUE is developed to enable efficient and secure data-driven research and application development based on distributed IoT devices. BLUE addresses three main challenges for supporting innovative smart campus applications based on distributed IoT devices: (a) establishing a programable campus infrastructure to support distributed and ad hoc IoT services, (b) providing strong security and privacy protection of IoT data, and (c) constructing an edge-cloud infrastructure to provide computing, networking, and storage resources to support smart-campus applications.

BLUE is a new software-defined infrastructure to support IoT-based data processing, analysis, and distribution over distributed IoT data sources. BLUE also supports a set of tangible metrics, such as network QoS metrics, location, resource consumption, etc., to effectively enable researchers to validate their research models. Moreover, BLUE takes privacy and security protection as a fundamental enabling technique by pushing the computation towards the edge computing and networking infrastructure.

Research applications built on this project share a common requirement for low-latency transfer of ever-larger data sets with collaborators across multiple geographic sites. This project will contribute to a national paradigm of campus-level dynamic network services that enables leading-edge network and domain-specific research.

BLUE can benefit the full range of campus scholarly activities, including research activities funded by NSF and other federal agencies. The outcomes of this project will be shared with the public based on an open-source license agreement. In addition, undergraduate and graduate student researchers will receive diverse STEM skills training, including networking research, big data analysis, and domain-specific research.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.