RINGS: Reshaping the Last Mile for High Availability and Resilience

RINGS：重塑最后一英里以实现高可用性和弹性

• 批准号: 2148230
• 负责人: Sylvia Ratnasamy
• 金额: $ 90万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-05-01 至 2025-04-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2148230&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RINGS; Reshaping; Last; Mile; Availability

A key part of the Internet infrastructure is the access or “last mile” link over which a user’s device connects to the Internet. This last-mile infrastructure is essential in ensuring that users enjoy high-quality access to Internet services. It is thus important that the last-mile infrastructure is highly available, protects user privacy, offers high performance, and yet is cost-efficient with a healthy ecosystem of innovative last-mile vendors. Unfortunately, today’s last-mile ecosystem — and the cellular ecosystem in particular — falls short on all of these dimensions. The goal of this project is to take initial steps toward transforming how our communication systems interact with the last mile. If successful, the resulting infrastructure would be more available, and the ecosystem would be incentivized to provide cost-effective and high-quality connectivity to all.The current last-mile ecosystem closely couples the usage of (scarce) access resources to whatever backend provider the user has contracted with. For example, today’s cellular architecture limits users to the facilities associated (directly or indirectly) with their mobile network operator This coupling limits resilience (i.e., surviving failures of individual access points or providers) as well as efficiency (since last-mile costs cannot be shared across operators). The latter in turn discourage deployment in rural areas and hence constrains the reach of network services. To improve both the resilience and efficiency of our cellular networks, this project explores a new access architecture that decouples last-mile resources from a user's choice of mobile operator. This enables users to make use of all available access resources, providing far greater protection from last-mile failures and making more markets financially viable. Realizing this decoupling requires three main areas of technical innovation. First, to achieve the desired decoupling, mobility should be handled outside the cellular core while preserving performance and feature parity with today's cellular networks. Second, recent developments have shown how current cellular protocols do not provide adequate levels of privacy. The decoupling of the last mile from the backend must be done in a way that not only matches but instead greatly exceeds the current privacy protections. Third, to allow users to seamlessly switch between cellular and Wi-Fi access, there must be a uniform way to authenticate users, and this approach should not require hardware or firmware changes to the underlying technologies.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.

互联网基础设施的一个关键部分是用户设备连接到互联网的接入或“最后一英里”链路。这一最后一英里基础设施对于确保用户享受高质量的互联网服务至关重要。因此，最后一英里基础设施必须高度可用，保护用户隐私，提供高性能，同时具有创新的最后一英里供应商的健康生态系统的成本效益。不幸的是，今天的最后一英里生态系统-特别是蜂窝生态系统-在所有这些方面都福尔斯欠缺。该项目的目标是采取初步措施，改变我们的通信系统与最后一英里的互动方式。如果成功，所产生的基础设施将更加可用，并且生态系统将被激励为所有人提供具有成本效益和高质量的连接。当前的最后一英里生态系统将（稀缺的）访问资源的使用与用户签约的任何后端提供商紧密耦合。例如，当今的蜂窝体系结构将用户限制到与他们的移动的网络运营商相关联（直接或间接）的设施。各个接入点或提供商的故障）以及效率（因为最后一英里成本不能在运营商之间分摊）。后者反过来又阻碍了在农村地区的部署，从而限制了网络服务的覆盖范围。为了提高我们的蜂窝网络的弹性和效率，该项目探索了一种新的接入架构，该架构可以从用户选择的移动的运营商那里获得最后一英里的资源。这使用户能够利用所有可用的接入资源，为最后一英里故障提供更大的保护，并使更多的市场在财务上可行。实现这种脱钩需要三个主要领域的技术创新。首先，为了实现所需的解耦，移动性应该在蜂窝核心之外处理，同时保持与当今蜂窝网络的性能和功能等同。其次，最近的发展表明，当前的蜂窝协议无法提供足够的隐私级别。最后一英里与后端的解耦必须以一种不仅匹配而且大大超过当前隐私保护的方式完成。第三，为了使用户能够在蜂窝和Wi-Fi接入之间无缝切换，必须有一种统一的方式来认证用户，这种方法不应要求对底层技术进行硬件或固件更改。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。