RINGS: Reshaping the Last Mile for High Availability and Resilience

互联网基础设施的一个关键部分是接入或“最后一英里”链接，用户的设备通过它连接到互联网。这种最后一英里的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，重要的是，最后一英里的基础设施是高度可用的，保护用户隐私，提供高性能，同时在创新的最后一英里供应商的健康生态系统中具有成本效益。不幸的是，今天的最后一英里生态系统——尤其是蜂窝生态系统——在所有这些方面都存在不足。这个项目的目标是迈出第一步，改变我们的通信系统与最后一英里的互动方式。如果成功，由此产生的基础设施将更加可用，生态系统将受到激励，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所签约的后端提供商紧密结合在一起。例如，今天的蜂窝架构将用户限制在与其移动网络运营商（直接或间接）相关的设施上，这种耦合限制了弹性（即，单个接入点或提供商的幸存故障）以及效率（因为最后一英里的成本不能在运营商之间共享）。后者反过来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。为了提高蜂窝网络的弹性和效率，该项目探索了一种新的接入架构，将最后一英里资源与用户选择的移动运营商分离。这使用户能够利用所有可用的接入资源，为防止最后一英里故障提供更大的保护，并使更多的市场在经济上可行。实现这种分离需要三个主要的技术创新领域。首先，为了实现期望的解耦，移动性应该在蜂窝核心之外进行处理，同时保持与当今蜂窝网络的性能和功能相同。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。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，为了允许用户在蜂窝和Wi-Fi访问之间无缝切换，必须有一种统一的方式来验证用户，这种方法不应该要求对底层技术进行硬件或固件更改。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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。

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.