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设备在全球范围内部署，用于各种应用领域，包括医疗保健、交通运输、能源、制造、环境传感等。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，由于规模挑战，目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同时托管多个应用程序的环境中运行，并在不同所有者的物理空间中移动，因此需要在设备和物理空间中存在的感知、处理、通信和行动资源的信任域之间灵活共享。解决这些新出现的挑战需要对当前物联网系统的设备边缘云架构进行彻底的重新思考。在这个项目中，研究人员正在探索一种名为“协作物联网”（icoct）的新架构方法。在ic10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联物联网设备的无定形集合上，同时利用新兴的设备上计算加速器。该项目将解决与icc愿景相关的三个关键挑战：(i)资源受限的物联网设备上的安全多租户；（ii）物联网设备之间的安全协作；（iii）对分布在物联网设备及其运行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提供基础，而不会像使用传统服务器基础设施那样产生巨大的成本和能源足迹。其次，通过安全利用附近设备和物理空间中的资源，它将允许涉及丰富的高维传感器和复杂物理控制的物联网应用在任何地方运行。这包括以复杂方式与社会空间和建筑环境互动的自主城市机器人。此外，项目团队将开展具体的、影响更广泛的活动，以促进教育、技术转型和扩大参与。特别是，为了创建和培养一个由研究人员和实践者组成的icc社区，项目团队将发布开源软件，创建实验平台，组织研讨会，并通过两个大学预科项目——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——扩大当地高中对计算的参与。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 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.