SpecEES: Towards Secure Decision Making in Spectrum and Energy Efficient IoT Systems

物联网（IoT）最近成为未来几代无线网络的强大新范例。在物联网中，各种各样的设备，如身体传感器、植入物、动物生物芯片转发器、沿海水域的电蛤、车辆传感器、环境/食品/病原体监测传感器以及救灾行动中的设备，都通过无线接口连接到互联网。将这无数的移动设备连接到互联网可能会带来广泛的创新网络应用。然而，在充分发挥其潜力之前，需要解决物联网面临的独特技术挑战，例如大规模连接、安全漏洞和能源可持续性等。该项目旨在为无线功能计算开发一个强大而安全的框架，以专门解决物联网应用中的挑战。该框架的使能特征是，在许多物联网应用中，网络化功能计算的目标不是恢复各种设备收集并通过网络传输的全部数据，而是辅助某些决策，为此决策者只需要计算这些分布式数据的一个函数。该项目的主要思想是开发安全和频谱/节能协议，使决策者能够在不首先从传感设备恢复全部数据的情况下计算感兴趣的功能。因此，无线链路不再仅仅作为数据管道，而是成为物联网应用中智能决策过程的一个组成部分。该项目的成功实施将对实际应用和理论发展做出重大贡献。在应用层面，该项目有可能大幅提高频谱效率、能源效率和对未来物联网网络主动攻击的鲁棒性。在理论方面，本项目将开发低复杂度、高效、鲁棒的功能计算算法，使物联网应用能够及时、准确地做出决策。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。

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has recently emerged as a powerful new paradigm for future generations of wireless networks. In IoT, a wide variety of devices, such as body sensors, implants, animal biochip transponders, electric clams in coastal waters, vehicular sensors, sensors for environmental/food/pathogen monitoring, and devices in disaster relief operations, are connected to the Internet via wireless interfaces. Connecting this myriad of mobile devices to the Internet could potentially lead to a broad range of innovative network applications. However, unique technical challenges for IoT, such as massive connectivity, security vulnerability and energy sustainability, among others, need to be addressed before such potentials can be fully fulfilled. This project aims to develop a robust and secure framework for wireless function computing to specifically address challenges in IoT applications. The enabling characteristic of this framework is that in many IoT applications, instead of recovering the full data collected by various devices and transmitted over the network, the goal of the networked functional computing is to assist certain decision making, for which the decision makers only need to compute a function of these distributed data. The main idea of this project is to develop secure and spectrum/energy efficient protocols that enable the decision maker to compute functions of interest without first recovering the full data from sensing devices. Thus, instead of acting as mere data pipes, wireless links become an integral part of the smart decision process in IoT applications. Successful execution of this project will make substantial contributions to both practical applications and theory development. On the application level, this project has the potential to substantially improve the spectrum efficiency, energy efficiency and robustness to active attacks for future IoT networks. On the theory side, this project will develop low-complexity efficient and robust function computing algorithms that enable IoT applications to make timely and accurate decisions.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.