CCRI: Planning: Collaborative Research: A Software-defined Wireless Communications Network Research Infrastructure for the Industrial Internet of Things(IIoT)Research Community

工业物联网（IIoT）是物联网（IoT）技术在工业系统中的应用，目前正被应用于许多行业。具体而言，在制造业中，IIoT系统通常部署在恶劣和复杂的环境中，必须满足系统级可靠性、时序性能、能效和安全性要求。此外，IIoT技术可以用来优化产品质量和生产线的生产力，避免可能导致性能和安全问题的过程异常和故障。然而，IIoT带来的这些独特机遇在其通信结构设计、分布式数据管理、分析和决策以及安全保护方面带来了挑战。该CCRI规划提案描述了支持创新软件定义IIoT基础设施设计的规划活动，该基础设施将在三个参与机构联合部署，该基础设施将作为广泛的计算机和信息科学与工程（CISE）研究人员的统一测试平台。据设想，这一拟议的基础设施将在更广泛的CISE社区中实现并支持大量与IIoT相关的研究项目。它将极大地推动工业物联网技术的采用，加速传统通信基础设施向先进网络和计算基础设施的转型，并促进国家的经济增长和竞争力。拟议的新型工业物联网社区基础设施的动机是研究界现有工业物联网测试床的局限性。这些局限性包括：（i）缺乏在现实制造环境中的部署;（ii）无法支持异构网络结构和可扩展的网络管理和数据分析。为了解决这些限制，本项目将利用现有的社区外展场所，接触相关的CISE研究社区，以最好地了解社区需求及其对拟议基础设施的期望。 拟议的IIoT社区研究基础设施将是同类设施中的第一个：（a）将软件定义网络（SDN）骨干和基于软件定义无线电（SDR）的实时无线边缘网络结合到混合通信结构中，以模拟各种工业网络环境;（B）为实时IIoT系统监控、分析和决策提供分层实时计算平台;以及（c）将部署在各个站点的边缘计算设施组织成多站点IIoT区块链网络，以支持分布式数据管理技术的研究。建议的基础设施在设备和系统层面的灵活性和可配置性将使不同社区的CISE研究人员能够访问测试台，部署他们的协议，算法和应用程序，并通过实验验证新的想法和创新。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is the application of Internet of Things (IoT) technology to industrial systems and is being employed in a number of industry sectors. Specifically, in the manufacturing sector, IIoT systems are often deployed in harsh and complex environments and have to satisfy system-level dependability, timing performance, energy-efficiency, and security requirements. Moreover, IIoT technology can be leveraged to optimize the quality of products and the productivity of manufacturing lines and avoid process anomalies and faults that can lead to subpar performance and safety issues. However, these unique opportunities brought by IIoT pose challenges in their communication fabric design, distributed data management, analysis and decision making, and security protection. This CCRI planning proposal describes the planning activities underpinning the design of an innovative software-defined IIoT infrastructure to be jointly deployed at the three participating institutions, which will serve as a unified test-bed for a broad range of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) researchers. It is envisioned that this proposed infrastructure will enable and support a large number of IIoT related research projects in the broader CISE community. It will vastly advance the adoption of IIoT technology, accelerate the transformation of legacy communication infrastructure to advanced networking and computing infrastructure, and boost the nation's economic growth and competitiveness.The proposed novel IIoT community infrastructure is motivated by the observed limitations of existing IIoT test-beds in the research community. These limitations include (i) a lack of deployment in real-life manufacturing environments and (ii) the inability to support heterogeneous network structures and scalable network management and data analytics. To address these limitations, this project will utilize established community outreach venues to reach out to the relevant CISE research communities to best understand the community needs and their expectations for the proposed infrastructure. The proposed IIoT community research infrastructure will be the first of its kind that (a) combines software-defined networking (SDN) backbone and software-defined radio (SDR)-based real-time wireless edge networks into a hybrid communication fabric to emulate a variety of industrial networking environments; (b) provides a hierarchical real-time computing platform for real-time IIoT system monitoring, analysis and decision making; and (c) organizes the edge computing facilities deployed at individual sites into a multi-site IIoT Blockchain network to support research on distributed data management technologies. The flexibility and configurability of the proposed infrastructure at both device and system levels will enable diverse communities of CISE researchers to access the test-bed, deploy their protocols, algorithms and applications, and experimentally validate new ideas and innovations.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.