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，用于各种应用领域，从医疗保健到交通运输，到能源，到制造业，到环境传感等等。这种增长带来了重大挑战。首先，由于云基础设施的增长相对较慢，目前从物联网设备卸载数据以在云服务器上计算的做法将由于扩展挑战而无法持续。其次，未来的物联网设备将在同时托管多个应用程序并跨不同所有者的物理空间移动的环境中运行，因此需要在设备和物理空间中存在的感测，处理，通信和动作资源的信任域之间进行灵活共享。解决这些新出现的挑战需要彻底重新思考物联网系统当前的设备-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，应用程序计算不是将设备数据卸载到边缘和云服务器，而是分布在产生和消费数据的互连物联网设备的无定形集合中，同时利用新兴的设备上计算加速器。该项目将解决与物联网愿景相关的三个关键挑战：（i）在资源受限的物联网设备上实现安全的多租户;（ii）物联网设备之间的安全协作;以及（iii）跨物联网设备及其运行空间分布的资源的弹性管理。该项目的社会效益是双重的。首先，它将为大规模的物联网基础设施提供基础，而不会产生与使用传统服务器基础设施相关的巨大成本和能源足迹。其次，它将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通过安全地利用附近设备和物理空间中的资源在任何地方运行。这包括自主城市机器人以复杂的方式与社会空间和建筑环境进行交互。此外，项目小组将开展具体的、影响更广泛的活动，以促进教育、技术过渡和扩大参与。特别是，为了创建和培养物联网技术的研究人员和从业者社区，项目团队将发布开源软件，创建实验测试平台，组织研讨会，并通过使用两个大学预科课程扩展到当地高中，为扩大计算参与做出贡献：加州大学洛杉矶分校的洛杉矶计算圈和马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校的夏季图灵研究所。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得支持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。

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.