Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Medium: IoCT: System Mechanisms for Enabling an Internet of Collaborative Things

物联网(IoT)设备的快速增长预示着未来将有数万亿台设备在全球范围内部署，用于从医疗保健、交通运输、能源、制造、环境传感等不同应用领域。这样的增长带来了巨大的挑战。首先，由于云基础设施的增长相对较慢，由于扩展挑战，当前从物联网设备卸载数据以在云服务器上进行计算的做法将不可持续。其次，未来的物联网设备将在这样的环境中运行，在这种环境中，它们将同时托管多个应用程序，并与不同的所有者跨物理空间移动，因此需要跨设备和物理空间中存在的感知、处理、通信和操作资源的信任域进行灵活共享。应对这些新出现的挑战需要从根本上重新思考当前物联网系统的设备边缘云架构。在这个项目中，研究人员正在探索一种新的架构方法，称为“协作物联网”(IoCT)。在IoCT中，不是将设备数据分流到边缘和云服务器，而是将应用计算分布在产生和使用数据的互连IoT设备的无定形集合中，同时利用新兴的设备上计算加速器。该项目将解决与IoCT愿景相关的三个关键挑战：(I)资源受限的IoT设备上的安全多租户；(Ii)IoT设备之间的安全协作；以及(Iii)对分布在IoT设备及其运营空间中的资源进行弹性管理。该项目的社会效益是双重的。首先，它将为大规模物联网基础设施奠定基础，而无需使用传统服务器基础设施所带来的巨大成本和能源消耗。其次，它将通过安全地利用附近设备和物理空间中存在的资源，允许涉及丰富的高维传感器和复杂的物理控制的物联网应用程序在任何地方运行。这包括自主的城市机器人以复杂的方式与社交空间和建成的环境互动。此外，项目组将开展具体的、更广泛的影响活动，以促进教育、过渡技术和扩大参与。特别是，为了创建和培育研究人员和从业人员的IoCT社区，项目团队将发布开源软件，创建实验试验台，组织研讨会，并通过使用两个大学前项目-加州大学洛杉矶分校的洛杉矶计算圈和马萨诸塞州大学阿默斯特分校的夏季图灵研究所-通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The rapid growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices points to a future with trillions of devices deployed at a planetary scale for use in diverse application domains, ranging from healthcare, to transportation, to energy, to manufacturing, to environmental sensing, and more. Such growth poses significant challenges. First, due to the relatively slower growth of cloud infrastructure, the current practice of offloading data from IoT devices for computing at cloud servers will not be sustainable due to scaling challenges. Second, future IoT devices will operate in environments where they will host multiple applications simultaneously and move across physical spaces with different owners, thus requiring flexible sharing across trust domains of sensing, processing, communication, and action resources present in the devices and the physical spaces. Addressing these emerging challenges requires a radical rethinking of the current device-edge-cloud architecture of IoT systems. In this project, the researchers are exploring a new architecture approach called the “Internet of Collaborating Things” (IoCT). In IoCT, instead of offloading device data to edge and cloud servers, the application computation is distributed across an amorphous collection of interconnected IoT devices that produce and consume data, while harnessing emerging on-device compute accelerators. The project will address three key challenges associated with the IoCT vision: (i) secure multitenancy on resource-constrained IoT devices; (ii) secure collaboration among IoT devices; and (iii) resilient management of resources distributed across IoT devices and the spaces they are operating in. The societal benefits of the project are twofold. First, it will provide the foundations for a massive-scale IoT infrastructure, without the large cost and energy footprint associated with using traditional server infrastructure. Second, it will allow IoT applications involving rich high-dimensional sensors and sophisticated physical control to be run anywhere by securely harnessing resources present in nearby devices and physical spaces. This includes autonomous urban robots interacting in complex manners with social spaces and built environments. Additionally, the project team will undertake specific broader impact activities to advance education, transition technology, and broaden participation. In particular, for creating and nurturing an IoCT community of researchers and practitioners, the project team will release open-source software, create experimental testbeds, organize workshops, and contribute to broadening participation in computing through outreach to local high schools using two pre-college programs: the Los Angeles Computing Circle at UCLA and the Summer Turing Institute at UMass Amherst.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.