RINGS: Reshaping the Last Mile for High Availability and Resilience

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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.