CCRI: Planning: Collaborative Research: A Software-defined Wireless Communications Network Research Infrastructure for the Industrial Internet of Things(IIoT)Research Community

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The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is the application of Internet of Things (IoT) technology to industrial systems and is being employed in a number of industry sectors. Specifically, in the manufacturing sector, IIoT systems are often deployed in harsh and complex environments and have to satisfy system-level dependability, timing performance, energy-efficiency, and security requirements. Moreover, IIoT technology can be leveraged to optimize the quality of products and the productivity of manufacturing lines and avoid process anomalies and faults that can lead to subpar performance and safety issues. However, these unique opportunities brought by IIoT pose challenges in their communication fabric design, distributed data management, analysis and decision making, and security protection. This CCRI planning proposal describes the planning activities underpinning the design of an innovative software-defined IIoT infrastructure to be jointly deployed at the three participating institutions, which will serve as a unified test-bed for a broad range of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) researchers. It is envisioned that this proposed infrastructure will enable and support a large number of IIoT related research projects in the broader CISE community. It will vastly advance the adoption of IIoT technology, accelerate the transformation of legacy communication infrastructure to advanced networking and computing infrastructure, and boost the nation's economic growth and competitiveness.The proposed novel IIoT community infrastructure is motivated by the observed limitations of existing IIoT test-beds in the research community. These limitations include (i) a lack of deployment in real-life manufacturing environments and (ii) the inability to support heterogeneous network structures and scalable network management and data analytics. To address these limitations, this project will utilize established community outreach venues to reach out to the relevant CISE research communities to best understand the community needs and their expectations for the proposed infrastructure. The proposed IIoT community research infrastructure will be the first of its kind that (a) combines software-defined networking (SDN) backbone and software-defined radio (SDR)-based real-time wireless edge networks into a hybrid communication fabric to emulate a variety of industrial networking environments; (b) provides a hierarchical real-time computing platform for real-time IIoT system monitoring, analysis and decision making; and (c) organizes the edge computing facilities deployed at individual sites into a multi-site IIoT Blockchain network to support research on distributed data management technologies. The flexibility and configurability of the proposed infrastructure at both device and system levels will enable diverse communities of CISE researchers to access the test-bed, deploy their protocols, algorithms and applications, and experimentally validate new ideas and innovations.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.