Dipankar Raychaudhuri - US grants

This collaborative research proposal is focused on the creation of a large-scale wireless network testbed which will facilitate a broad range of experimental research on next-generation protocols and application concepts. It is recognized that powerful technology and market trends towards portable computing and communication imply an increasingly important role for wireless access in the next-generation Internet. At the same time, new sensor and pervasive computing applications are expected to drive large-scale deployments of embedded computing devices interconnected via new types of short-range wireless networks. The speed of technology innovation in the wireless networking field can be significantly increased with the development of a flexible, open-access wireless network testbed that can be shared by experimental researchers across the networking community.

The proposed ORBIT (Open Access Research Testbed for Next-Generation Wireless Networks) system is a two-tier laboratory emulator/field trial network testbed designed to achieve reproducibility of experimentation, while also supporting evaluation of protocols and applications in real-world settings. In particular, the laboratory-based wireless network emulator will be constructed using a novel approach involving a large two-dimensional grid of static and mobile 802.11x radio nodes which can be dynamically interconnected into specified topologies with reproducible wireless channel models. All radio devices in the system provide open API's that permit end-users to download radio link, MAC and network layer protocols to construct a specific networking scenario. Once the basic protocol or application concepts have been validated on the lab emulator platform, users can migrate their experiments to the field test network which provides a configurable mix of both high-speed cellular (3G) and 802.11x wireless access in a real-world setting. Extensive measurement tools will be provided to support research evaluation, including both network traffic and radio link/spectrum usage aspects.

In addition to the development of the ORBIT wireless testbed infrastructure, this project includes a comprehensive set of "experimental work packages" intended to generate design requirements and serve as end-user application drivers for the system being developed. Specific research topics to be covered during the course of this project are:

1. Ad hoc networking in 802.11x WLAN scenarios [Raychaudhuri, Seskar; Rutgers & Acharya; IBM]
2. Message-based multimedia delivery [Schulzrinne, Columbia; Yates, Rutgers]
3. XML-based content multicasting for mobile information services [Ott, Raychaudhuri; Rutgers]
4. Location-based mobile network services [Schulzrinne; Columbia]
5. Pervasive computing software models for sensor networks [Parashar, Zhang; Rutgers]
6. Security protocols for next-generation wireless networks [Kobayashi; Princeton & Trappe; Rutgers]
7. Intelligent network middleware (INM) for mobile services [Paul; Lucent Bell Labs]
8. Peer-to-peer infrastructure for VoIP and IM [Acharya, Saha; IBM Research]
9. Power/bandwidth efficient media delivery to portable platforms [Ramaswamy, Wang; Thomson R&D]

The project will be conducted as a collaborative effort between several university research groups in the NY/NJ region: Rutgers, Columbia, and Princeton, along with industrial partners Lucent Bell Labs, IBM Research and Thomson. The wireless network testbed will be developed and operated by Rutgers WINLAB, using facilities located at the Rutgers New Brunswick campus and at partner sites in the area. The testbed will be available for remote or on-site access by other research groups nationally, subject to NSF guidelines for use. Additional partners will be sought during the course of the program both for testbed infrastructure development and for research collaboration.

The scientific/technical merits of the proposed project are: advancing the state-of-the-art in design and
implementation of flexible and scalable wireless network testbeds, and experimental investigation of novel
architectures, protocols and service concepts for next-generation wireless networks. Broader impacts are in
acceleration of the R & D cycle for wireless networking by providing the research community with a shared-use experimental platform, and in fostering increased use of experimental methods in both research and teaching.

The Internet is one of the great technology success stories of the twentieth century, enabling greater access to information and providing new modes of communication among people and organizations. Unfortunately, the Internet's very success is now creating obstacles to innovation in the networking technology that lies at its core. In order to free the global communications infrastructure from stagnation, the nation must find ways to enable its continuing renewal.

This planning project is aimed at creating a blueprint for a global experimental infrastructure needed to support a research program in network architectures and distributed systems. The goal of the research program combined with experimental infrastructure is to greatly increase the functional capabilities, robustness, flexibility, and heterogeneity of the global communications network in the face of modern application requirements, and a rich, competitive commercial environment. The key is to re-architect or re-invent the Internet to be more evolvable-to enable the research community to address the key challenges facing the Internet, and in the process, to build an Internet that is worthy of our society's trust.

Re-architecting the Internet would require substantial experimental infrastructure. The PIs propose to write a comprehensive plan to build this infrastructure. The proposal identifies the major architectural initiatives that address the challenges facing the Internet, outlines the empirical research process the community will use to pursue these initiatives, describes the experimental infrastructure needed to support this research, and highlights the process of putting in place a management structure for the large infrastructure.

This project aims to involve the wireless and mobile network research communities in a discussion of new architectures and disruptive technologies for the future Internet, leading to a white paper with future R&D recommendations. The objective is to solicit service requirements and innovative network architecture concepts from wireless, mobile and sensor net researchers at universities and industrial/government research labs, and to consolidate this input into a coherent vision/agenda for future research and experimental infrastructure needs.

The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and the CISE research community are planning an initiative called Global Environment for Networking Innovations or GENI to explore new networking capabilities that will advance science and stimulate innovation and economic growth. The GENI Initiative responds to an urgent and important challenge of the 21st Century to advance significantly the capabilities provided by networking and distributed system architectures.
To have significant impact, innovative research and design ideas must be implemented, deployed, and tested in realistic environments involving significant numbers of users and hosts. The initiative includes the deployment of a state-of-the-art, global experimental GENI Facility that will permit exploration and evaluation under realistic conditions. The GENI Facility will permit a range of researchers, including network engineers, policy analysts, protocol designers, system architects, and economic modelers to contribute to and study innovative new capabilities for the global network of the future. Assuming the concept proves to be as promising as currently anticipated, GENI construction will be considered for funding from NSF's MREFC account.

In support of making the case for GENI as a MREFC project, the PIs propose to undertake a set of tasks to advance the GENI project definition from the Conceptual Design, through the MREFC Readiness Stage, to Preliminary Design. This will involve addressing a set of design issues; taking the definition of various components of the facility to the next level of specificity; creating a detailed work breakdown structure (WBS), bottom up budget, schedule, contingency, and critical path analysis for each component and the facility as a whole; and taking the project management definition for construction and operation to the next level of specificity with due considerations to special requirements of GENI.

Proposal Number: 0626740
PI: Dipankar Raychaudhuri
Institution: Rutgers University (collaborative with Kansas U and CMU)

Proposal Number: 0626676
PI: Joe Evans
Institution: Kansas University (collaborative with Kansas U and CMU)

Proposal Number: 0626827
PI: Srini Seshan
Institution: CMU


Title: Collaborative NeTS-FIND: CogNet An Experimental Protocol Stack for Cognitive Radio Networks and Its Integration with the Future Internet

Project Abstract
This project has two major thrusts: the first is to identify broad architecture and protocol design approaches for cognitive radio networks at both local network and the global internetwork level. This architectural study is intended to lead to the design of control/management and data interfaces between cognitive radio nodes in a local network, and also between cognitive radio subnetworks and the global Internet. The second thrust is to apply these architectural and protocol design results to prototype an open-source cognitive radio protocol (the CogNet stack) and use it for experimental evaluations on emerging cognitive radio platforms. A number of architectural issues are examined as we try to identify an efficient and complete solution these include control and management protocols, support for collaborative PHY, dynamic spectrum coordination, flexible MAC layer protocols, ad hoc group formation and cross-layer adaptation.
The experimental component of this project aims to prototype an open-source Linux-based CogNet software protocol stack for use with emerging cognitive radio platforms (such as the GNU/USRP2 radio to be used as the baseline, the KU agile radio or the Lucent/WINLAB network-centric prototype), and make this software available for community research. The prototype software is validated in two steps: first in a wireless local-area radio network scenario with moderate numbers of cognitive radio nodes, and later as part of several end-to-end experiments using a wide-area network testbed such as PlanetLab (and GENI in the future).

The ORBIT Radio Grid as a Flexible Large-Scale Community Testbed for Next-Generation Wireless Network Research

The 400-node ORBIT radio grid facility at Rutgers was developed under the NSF NRT program (2003-07) with the objective of enabling realistic and reproducible wireless network experiments at scale. The ORBIT radio grid was first made available to research users on an informal basis in Oct 2005, and since then, has rapidly become a de-facto community resource for evaluation of emerging wireless network architectures and protocols. ORBIT is also being used as a proof-of-concept platform for validating wireless aspects of NSF?s GENI future Internet infrastructure.

This project is aimed at supporting community release of the ORBIT radio grid testbed on a more formal basis. This involves several key technical upgrades necessary to support emerging experimental needs, as well as enhancements to service software and operations staffing necessary for a 24/7 shared testbed facility. Specific work items to be carried out in this project include:
? Feature upgrades including support for software-defined radios, improved topology and mobility control, and wired + wireless network emulation.
? Virtualization of the radio grid to support multiple simultaneous experiments.
? Improved ORBIT user portal, along with enhanced software and operations support services.
? ?ORBIT kit? development and establishment of an open-source software repository.
Major deliverables of the project include community release of the ORBIT radio grid testbed with enhanced technical and service support features in year 2, followed by an upgrade with GNU/URSP2 software radios in year 3.

The ORBIT open access testbed for next-generation wireless networking at Rutgers was developed to address the challenge of supporting realistic and reproducible wireless networking experiments at scale. The 400-node ORBIT radio grid was released as a community resource in 2005, and can be accessed by researchers via an Internet portal (www.orbit-lab.org) which provides a variety of services to assist users with experiment setup, control and measurement. This project is aimed at a major hardware upgrade of the computing equipment and measurement instruments which make up the ORBIT testbed. Specific equipment items being upgraded are:

- All 400 ORBIT radio nodes which serve as the primary computing platform for experimenters.
- Computing/storage servers and switching equipment in the ORBIT backend cluster.
- RF measurement instruments for spectrum monitoring on the radio grid.

This project also includes resources for ongoing maintenance and software support necessary for continued 24/7 operation of the ORBIT facility as a community resource. The proposed equipment upgrade will prepare ORBIT for anticipated higher performance experiments on emerging wireless technologies and network architectures. Specific areas of experimental research that will be enabled by the upgraded ORBIT testbed include dynamic spectrum access, cognitive networking, wireless security, delay-tolerant routing protocols and network virtualization. As an open community facility, ORBIT helps lower the barrier for experimentation on wireless networks, thus improving teaching and research productivity in the field. The testbed currently serves as an important platform for wireless aspects of future Internet architecture research in the NSF computer science and engineering communities.

This project is aimed at the design and experimental validation of a comprehensive clean-slate future Internet architecture. The proposed MobilityFirst architecture is motivated by the ongoing paradigm shift of Internet usage from today?s fixed PC/host (client)?server model to emerging mobile data services and pervasive computing applications. The major design goals of the architecture are: mobility as the norm with dynamic host and network mobility at scale; robustness with respect to intrinsic properties of the wireless medium; trustworthiness in the form of enhanced security and privacy; usability features such as support for context-aware services, evolvability, manageability and economic viability. The key components of the MobilityFirst network design are: (1) separation of naming and addressing, implemented via a fast global dynamic name resolution service; (2) self-certifying public key network addresses to support strong authentication and security; (3) generalized delay-tolerant routing with in-network storage for packets in transit; (4) flat-label internetwork routing with public key addresses; (5) hop-by-hop transport protocols operating over segments rather than an end-to-end path; (6) a separate network management plane that provides enhanced visibility; (7) optional privacy features for user and location data; and (8) an integrated computing and storage layer to support programmability. The project?s scope includes architectural design, validation of key protocol components, testbed prototyping of the MobilityFirst architecture as a whole, and real-world protocol deployment on the GENI experimental infrastructure. The results of this project will provide architectural guidance for cellular-Internet convergence, and are expected to influence future technical standards in the networking industry.

The product the team aims to bring to market is a cloud-based video encoding and transcoding service with superior performance, flexibility and security features. Customers using this service would upload video files through a web portal (or API) for encoding/transcoding into their choice of formats and bit-rates suitable for display on mobile devices. The differentiating features of the planned cloud video product include: (a) fast encoding/transcoding speed with superior video quality, (b) excellent cost/performance, and (c) the ability to support a wide variety of input and output video formats. Implementation of the proposed cloud service will employ distributed computing technologies such as Map/Reduce and Hadoop to achieve significant parallelism in video processing, resulting in efficient use of computing resources and faster processing time.

The cloud video prototype to be developed in this project is expected to result in a commercial service with significant revenue potential. The product will simplify video encoding and transcoding for a variety of enterprises including content producers, broadcasters and mobile service providers, by providing on-demand and low-cost video conversion services that currently require on-site equipment with related capital costs. If successful, the cloud video technology will thus enable improved and lower cost mobile content delivery benefiting a broad cross section of Internet and wireless end-users.

This award is aimed at the development and community release of a Wideband Software Extensible Radio (WiSER) platform along with a reference implementation for small outdoor deployment of a multi-node dynamic spectrum network. Dynamic spectrum technologies are strategically important to the wireless community because of the urgent need to alleviate spectrum congestion resulting from ongoing exponential growth in mobile data usage. While a great deal of theoretical work has already been done on dynamic spectrum techniques, definitive experimental evaluations of potential gains have yet to be conducted. The lack of experimental research is mainly due to the fact that available open platforms suitable for academic experimentation with software defined radio (SDR) are limited to first-generation technologies that operate at low bandwidth and can only handle a limited amount of MAC/PHY customization due to inherent processing constraints. The proposed WiSER platform is a second generation wideband open-source SDR platform that will enable new experimental research in the fields of dynamic spectrum and cognitive radio networking. The WiSER radio?s target release is timed to coincide with significant new national research and policy initiatives in dynamic spectrum involving the NSF, FCC, PCAST, NIST, DARPA and other agencies. This platform enables a richer range of experimental dynamic spectrum research than is currently possible because of its key technical features: operation across 400MHz-4000MHz in 125MHz increments, hardware acceleration for real-world PHY waveforms at speeds of 100 Mbps and higher, hardware virtualization capable of supporting multiple radios on the same platform, and an open-source software toolkit.

This project will develop a community resource supported by currently available radios along with an open-source software framework and reference system implementation. Such a resource will allow for research into a very scarce and important public resource ? radio spectrum. By improving reliable access to spectrum, our society benefits in terms of enhancing mobile broadband, improving public safety communications, and ensuring that radar and other spectrum uses are not degraded as the spectrum becomes more densely used. The WiSER team will work closely with experimental research groups nationally to help develop relevant and timely experimental deployments of dynamic spectrum technology. Dynamic spectrum access technology has the potential for order-of-magnitude improvement in spectrum efficiency necessary to cope with the recent explosion of mobile data traffic. Cognitive radio systems will also provide improved connectivity to end users, and enable new applications such as emergency response systems and automotive networks. This project will directly inform these important societal needs by enabling the research community to build state-of-the-art experimental systems for conclusive evaluation of these emerging technologies. Lastly, this platform will offer a powerful educational tool for students wanting to better understand modern digital and software-based radio communications.

This project is aimed at achieving significant spectrum efficiency gains through inter network collaboration in radio resource management. The proposed SAVANT (spectrum access via inter network collaboration) architecture is based on a new protocol interface for dissemination of spectrum usage information, policies and algorithms between neighboring networks to enable spectrum coexistence algorithms that reduce interference and improve spectrum packing efficiency. A new inter-domain spectrum coordination protocol (ISCP) is being developed to enable independent networks to negotiate radio resource management policies and optionally merge radio resource controllers for joint optimization.

The scope of research to be conducted includes ISCP protocol design/validation, evaluation of alternative algorithms involving network collaboration, prototype implementation and performance evaluation. The methodology for the project involves a mix of analysis, simulation and experimental prototyping. Generalized analytical models for radio localization, propagation and interference are developed and incorporated into simulation studies of inter-network cooperation using the ISCP protocol framework. These simulation models are expected to provide insight into the type of collaborative radio resource optimization algorithm to be used along with quantitative evaluation of ISCP overhead, complexity and performance. The project also includes an experimental prototyping track in which emerging software-defined network (SDN) technology is used to develop a proof-of-concept system with multiple collaborating networks.

The proposed ISCP inter-network protocol has the potential for large gains in wireless spectrum utilization, and could thus influence future industry standards. The project will also produce educational materials for training of graduate students in software-defined networking and wireless systems.

The Next-Phase MobilityFirst (MF) project aims to have a major impact on the architecture of the future Internet by re-architecting it to address the needs of emerging mobile platforms and applications. Adoption of technologies arising from this project may be expected to provide improved efficiency, security and robustness that would benefit both network operators and end-users of the Internet. This project, originally funded as a collaborative research effort under the NSF Future Internet Architecture (FIA) program (2010-13) in which the MF architecture was designed over the past 3 years, is centered on a new name-based service layer which serves as the narrow-waist of the protocol; this name-based services layer makes it possible to build advanced mobility-centric services in a flexible manner while also improving security and privacy properties. The architecture incorporates novel storage-aware routing techniques which provide significant improvements in mobile network capacity and functionality. The next phase of the MobilityFirst project is aimed at making the transition from early-stage architecture and prototyping to advanced real-world services and trial network deployments. The research and experimental trials agenda is aimed at validating and refining the core name service, routing, security and management components of the MF architecture, while also responding to emerging trends in network technology and services such as the cellular mobile data explosion, the growth of content, the emergence of cloud computing, and software-defined network (SDN) technology.

Intellectual Merit: This project includes several research thrusts aimed at transitioning the MobilityFirst architecture to advanced services and field deployable technology. These include: (1) advanced name-based network services and development of enhanced global name service (GNS) technology; (2) network security and privacy designs and enhancements; (3) design of advanced content services; (4) application of MobilityFirst protocols to next-generation mobile cloud computing; (5) design of advanced context-aware services; (6) technical and economic study of cellular-Internet convergence; (7) software-defined network (SDN) ready protocol design; and (8) technology platforms, router implementation and deployment strategies. These research thrusts will be informed by three distinct real-world network environment trials: a "mobile data services" trial with a wireless ISP (5Nines) in Madison; WI; a "content production and delivery network" trial involving several public broadcasting stations in Pennsylvania connected by a greenfield optical network called PennREN; and a "context-aware public service" weather emergency notification system (CASA) with end-users in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. These network environment trials are the centerpiece of the proposed project, and are expected to provide a firm basis for validation of the MobilityFirst protocol stack and its usefulness for developing advanced mobile, content, context and cloud applications, while also advancing the technology to the field-deployment stage. Expected outcomes from the project include research results on security, privacy, content/context/cloud services and SDN; MobilityFirst protocol stack software revisions; router technology implementations; multiple real-world trial deployments of the technology; and experimentally supported evaluations of the architecture. This project is a collaborative effort involving Rutgers, UMass, MIT, Duke, U Michigan, U Wisconsin, and U Nebraska with the participation of several industrial research and network environment trial partners.

Broader Impacts: The MobilityFirst project will have impact as a new approach to a future Internet that by design addresses mobility and mobile platforms, and as an enabler of new mobile Internet applications of social value such as context-aware emergency notification services. The release of open source protocol software may be expected to help to stimulate further experimental research on future Internet architectures across the networking community. The project also contributes to education and training in the key areas of Internet and mobile network technology.

This project leverages prior work on virtual mobile network technology at NICT and the MobilityFirst future Internet architecture at WINLAB, Rutgers University, to develop a comprehensive services and networking solution for high-performance cyber physical systems that scales to the "trillion object" level targeted by the JUNO program. The aim is to develop a virtual mobile cloud network (vMCN) which provides seamless and low latency services to real-time mobile users and applications.

Major research themes addressed by this project include the design of a new virtual networking framework using NICT's BYON mobile cloud technology integrated with MobilityFirst's globally unique identifier (GUID) based protocol stack; design of virtual network services for efficient support of cloud services; exploiting locality to speed up global name resolution; and dynamic migration of cloud services across networks. The project will adopt a top-down application driven methodology to validate and benchmark the performance of the proposed virtual mobile cloud network for a specific advanced CPS application. A proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed vMCN system will be developed using JGN-X and GENI testbeds in Japan and US respectively.

Technologies resulting from this project are expected to enable a wide range of commercial and government applications involving real-time cloud services for mobile devices. The project will also provide guidance for the development of future virtual network technologies of increasing interest to the networking and computer industries. The proposed collaboration will also help to strengthen research ties between US and Japan specifically in the field of future Internet architecture.

This project is aimed at a third-generation equipment upgrade for the ORBIT (Open Access Testbed for Next Generation Wireless Networking) testbed which has been operated by Rutgers University as a community resource since 2005. The ORBIT testbed, which researchers access remotely over the Internet, provides a flexible, scalable and reproducible platform for conducting wireless network experiments. ORBIT lowers the barrier for experimentation in the area of radio and wireless technology and thus improves education and research productivity in the field. The goal of this project is to extend the testbed to incorporate two key new capabilities: (1) LTE (Long Term Evolution) radio access, to support realistic evaluation of future mobile data services, and (2) "cloud radio" processing to enable experimental studies of emerging "5G" radio access technologies. The proposed testbed enhancements will help accelerate the pace of wireless/mobile technology development by facilitating evaluation of emerging radio technologies and network architectures such as dynamic spectrum access, cooperative MIMO (multiple input multiple output) and heterogeneous cellular networks. More specifically, the LTE and radio cloud capabilities to be added in this project will enable the study of techniques for enhancing wireless system capacity, helping to address the important societal problem of spectrum scarcity as mobile data usage continues to grow exponentially.

The ORBIT upgrade proposed here involves two major enhancements to the testbed. First, both the radio grid emulator and the outdoor ORBIT campus network will be upgraded to incorporate LTE in addition to the existing WiMax capability. LTE is rapidly being deployed in 4G cellular systems worldwide, and it is important to enable the research community to use this access technology for realistic mobile network experiments. LTE capability will be added to the outdoor ORBIT network by retrofitting a commercial base station to be controllable through the ORBIT management framework (OMF), while LTE on indoor nodes will be implemented in software running on available SDR platforms. Second, the radio grid's backend will be upgraded with a unique combination of FPGA and CPU based "software radio cloud" that will increase processing speeds by two orders-of-magnitude. The proposed radio cloud is designed as a hierarchically organized high-performance system which includes fast CPU-based servers, FPGA co-processors and "thin-client" software-defined radio nodes all connected together by a fast and programmable switching backplane. The system will include nearly 16 compute server blades (each with rated computing capacity of 700 GIPS), a large FPGA-based centralized co-processor array, a total of about 48 software defined radio (SDR) client nodes and about 128 x 10Gbps OpenFlow switch ports for connectivity. Examples of experiments that will be enabled include LTE-WiFi interworking, LTE-based mobile cloud services, wideband spectrum sensing and dynamic spectrum access algorithms, massive MIMO (multiple input multiple output) and cooperative PHY, cellular cloud RAN (radio access network) and virtual wireless networks. LTE capabilities will be released during year 1 of the project, and a first version of the radio cloud will be released in year 2, followed by an updated version in year 3.

This award is a planning grant for the Spectrum Innovation Initiative: National Center for Wireless Spectrum Research (SII-Center). The focus of a spectrum research SII-Center goes beyond 5G, IoT, and other existing or forthcoming systems and technologies to chart out a trajectory to ensure United States leadership in future wireless technologies, systems, and applications in science and engineering through the efficient use and sharing of the radio spectrum. This award is for ceenter planning with a truly interdisciplinary approach. The research agenda is comprehensive and cross-cutting, designed to address all aspects of spectrum use, as well as educational outreach.

This project is aimed at the development of a comprehensive plan for an exceptional SII-Center which would help maintain and extend US leadership in future wireless technologies, systems, and applications in science and engineering through the efficient use and sharing of radio spectrum. The team that has assembled for this SII planning proposal spans eight universities (Rutgers, Columbia, NYU, U. Arizona, UT Austin, Oregon State, Princeton, and U. Wisconsin-Madison) and consists of well-established wireless researchers with prior contributions to spectrum across a range of specializations: high frequency spectrum, economics and policy, spectrum protocols, cross layering, wireless systems physical-layer security, optical, wireless-fiber integration, wireless physical layer and modeling, network architecture, spectrum protocols, testbeds, and more. This award will fund activities towards the development of a compelling research agenda, pilot studies on key topics, engagement with research, government, and industry stakeholders, and plans for experimental infrastructure and education/workforce development.

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.

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.<br/><br/>Information technology infrastructure enables a wide variety of applications that serve almost every facet of contemporary life. Cloud services (mass storage and high-end computing power) are now commonly used as networks have become faster and more widespread. The introduction of even higher-speed wired and wireless (5G) access is pushing the boundary of cloud computing even farther. Commercial mobile network operators are now investing in multi-access edge cloud (MEC) technology, in which individuals and small enterprises support a self-organizing nexus of shared computing resources in a way that overcomes some of the limitations of long distance fiber. If the deployment of MEC platforms is left entirely to private investment by large service providers, it is likely that many people will not be served or served only by a single provider, leaving many end-users and communities without access or with access to services that are too expensive or otherwise fail to meet their quality-of-service needs. This SAI planning project develops the concept of an open collaborative public multi-access edge cloud (pMEC). The public edge cloud is designed to self-organize through voluntary contributions of under-utilized computing power within the community. A public edge cloud infrastructure makes it possible for users in under-served communities to access massive, close-in computing power without depending on the expensive services of large network operators. By broadening access to the internet and computing infrastructure of the United States, a public edge cloud capability promotes and sustains the nation’s competitive advantages in the global economy.<br/><br/>Design of the public edge cloud infrastructure requires a multi-disciplinary effort in which technology development is informed by business models and by cost and performance properties that promote end-user adoption. This SAI planning project focuses on technology considerations for the pMEC along with viable economic and business models with end-user adoption properties necessary to enable and sustain widespread deployment. The project develops preliminary architectural level designs for distributed public edge cloud deployments, identifying necessary enhancements to the emerging technical standards for 5G and cloud. It also develops plans for incentive-compatible business and cooperative governance models for the proposed community edge cloud to motivate initial deployment and sustainable operations. A small proof-of-concept prototype demonstrates the basic pMEC concept. Collaborations are developed to evaluate stakeholder behavioral responses regarding willingness to adopt and participate in proposed pMEC deployments. Delivering on the promise of public edge cloud infrastructure depends on growing multi-disciplinary collaborative research drawing on social, behavioral, and economic sciences in partnership with computer science and engineering.<br/><br/>This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences and the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE).<br/><br/>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.