CCRI: New: RUI: Testbed as-a Service: A Sandbox for Fostering Smart and Connected City Research & Development

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Smart Corridor+, which is built on Chattanooga’s city-wide 10 Gbps fiber optic Internet, contains an urban road segment as well as a freeway segment. The urban portion includes the existing MLK Smart Corridor, which is a 1.25-mile stretch of Chattanooga’s walkable urban core developed by University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) and the Chattanooga Smart Community Collaborative. The freeway portion is 2.5-miles of HWY27 with on and off ramps on the east corner of the MLK Smart Corridor. The goal is to build a Testbed-as-a-Service (TaaS) research infrastructure on Smart Corridor+. This will allow research projects by enabling access to comprehensive data representing an urban environment and facilitating deployment, testing, and validating algorithms in a large-scale and real-world setting. This programmable and accessible heterogeneous infrastructure spans multiple road types and technologies and collectively provides essential IoT, diverse communication technologies, and edge computing, Level-2 and Level-4 connected/autonomous vehicles, and software services. A web portal will allow scientists to access data and carry out specific experiments using the proposed TaaS. Research projects will focus on innovative IoT applications for improved urban mobility, public safety, smart infrastructure, and human/device behavioral analysis that cannot be otherwise performed. This project will host community events, conferences, hackathons, and workshops to recruit a diverse pool of users. An Advisory Board and a User Community Steering Committee (UCSC) will ensure that the infrastructure will benefit researchers and stakeholders, including residents. The proposed infrastructure and focused research projects will be leveraged to support multiple STEM education and research opportunities for all levels of students (graduate, undergraduate and high school) and researchers that will help develop a highly competitive and diverse STEM workforce for smart cities, public safety, IoT, transportation, and communication industries. The educational activities include improved graduate education, graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 research experiences, and broaden participation.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.