RINGS: Enabling Wireless Edge-cloud Services via Autonomous Resource Allocation and Robust Physical Layer Technologies

Over the past 20-years, wireless technologies have been revolutionized, with data rates increasing by several orders of magnitude. New wireless communication technologies, along with the emergence of computing capabilities at the network’s edge will make it possible to achieve giga-bits-per-second data rates and less than millisecond delays. This project develops network algorithms that leverage these emerging technologies to enable robust and resilient next generation of wireless networks, and novel applications, such as smart cities, connected vehicles, virtual reality, telemedicine, and advanced manufacturing.

The goal of this project is to develop autonomous network control algorithms that will enable robust and resilient distributed computing wireless networks through a combination of physical layer technology, edge-cloud computing, and intelligent network control. In particular, the project team is developing an autonomous network control framework that can jointly address resiliency in the physical and application layers by dynamically adapting the next-generation wireless communication systems to the time-varying conditions of the environment and, at the same time, intelligently allocating the available communication and computation resources in order to meet the performance requirements of time-sensitive edge-cloud services.

The network control framework makes resource allocation decisions dynamically and in an autonomous manner, without prior knowledge of traffic statistics and network conditions, making it resilient to changes in the network and environment. The project team is using the COSMOS testbed to prototype, experiment, and evaluate the network control framework and its application to edge cloud systems.

The project includes impactful outreach and education activities which, among other things, engage middle and high school teachers and students from NYC and the neighboring Harlem community in wireless networking, thereby broadening participation in Computing and STEM.

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.