| Project Title: | RINGS: Resilient Delivery of Real-TimeInteractive Services Over NextG Compute-Dense Mobile Networks |
| Funding Agency: | National Science Foundation |
| Award Number: | 2148315 |
Real-time interactive (RTI) services are anticipated to be the "next big thing" in information
technology, merging the areas of sensing, computation, and communications that until recently have been
treated separately. In traditional systems, these building blocks are not optimized to work with each
other, and particularly not in real-time, constraining the type of services that can be offered. RTIs
require real-time aggregation of distributed data streams onto edge/cloud compute servers that can
process data as soon as it is generated. The goal of this project is to develop a general mathematical
framework as well as concrete algorithms to provide such RTI services with guaranteed latencies. The
results benefit the US economy by enabling more efficient, more reliable, and more resilient automation
schemes, e.g., for smart factories and farms, as well as improved augmented/virtual reality. The
interdisciplinary nature of the project benefits the students working on this project; a detailed plan
for outreach and increasing participation of underrepresented groups strengthens the impact of the work.
The project designs a general mathematical framework and concrete algorithms for reliable and resilient
Real-time interactive (RTI) systems. In a first thrust, the project explores the limits of delivering
latency-critical services reliably. The establishment of the reliable network stability region provides
bounds on how much offered RTI traffic a network can support under the best of all algorithms. A
packet-lifetime-based queuing model serves as the basis of Lyapunov-drift-inspired control algorithms
that not only account for the packet delay but also takes cost such as energy consumption into account.
A second thrust of the project develops robust NextG network control algorithms that can adapt to
dynamic network states. Integration of the approaches in the first two thrusts under a common Lyapunov
drift control framework is an avenue to enable reliable RTI service delivery, which is verified by the
implementation of the algorithm on a Platform for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) community testbed.