This Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) project--a Type II (A:B) partnership between Syracuse University, an NSF PFI graduate (0227879, initiated at Tufts University), and Virginia Tech University, which is currently a research site of another NSF-supported partnership program: I/UCRC Wireless Internet Center for Advanced Technology (WICAT) (0809036)--is focused on the creation of the first national Wireless Grid Innovation Testbed (WGiT). The project integrates prior knowledge and technology. Scientists at universities will work with a consortium of private organizations in a laboratory with the resources to support open innovation and user-created innovations in a system that supports their capture, documentation, and improvement. The intellectual merit of this project lies in the innovative combination of grid networking and wireless networking. The ultimate vision of the wireless grid is that of an adaptive network with secure, inexpensive, and coordinated real-time access to dynamic, heterogeneous resources, across geographic, political and cultural boundaries without forsaking stability, transparency, scalability, control and flexibility. Better assessment of wireless grids technology, network performance, and user behavior will inform design, manufacturing and commercialization of next generation information and resource sharing innovations. The test bed will support training and courses related to innovation, wireless grids technologies and business/social impact opportunities. Students within a variety of courses from middle school through doctoral levels, as well as community workforce training programs, through work at the associated labs and in the field, will be given the opportunity of hands-on experience in the use of the wireless grid beta applications as they become available. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own wireless grid applications, building upon the open platform provided. New knowledge will be generated both on innovation models and entrepreneurial ecosystems, and on wireless grids.
The broader impact of wireless grid connectivity specifications developed with WGiT support will be determined ultimately by their utility to user and device communities. Open source developers interested in wireless grids distributed collaboration and network mash-up features will be significant early users. A wide range of new applications is expected across industry sectors and social communities. Businesses, government agencies and private individuals will have new options for interacting within and across regions. The testbed will provide students, faculty, firms, and representatives of government an opportunity to learn from and participate in the growth of this new market.
Partners at the inception of the project are Academic Institutions: Syracuse University (lead institution), Virginia Tech University, Tufts University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Instituto Superior Technico (IST), Lisbon, Portugal; Private Sector Organizations: Center for Advanced Engineering & Research, Inc. (CAER); Clear Channel Radio; MOD-ECO; Qualcomm, SenSyr LLV; Syracuse Research Corporation (SRC); Wireless Grids Corporation (WGC); Governmental and Intergovernmental Organizations: Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Portugal; and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), France.
Significant outcomes of the NSF Partnerships for Innovation project #0917973 include its recognition as the 'TACNY Technology Project of the Year.' Other outcomes of this PFI Wireless Grid Innovation Testbed (WiGiT), and its 'Best Thesis Prize'-winning Veterans Research Supplement, and its 'Top 3 Innovation of Year' (Emergency Management Magazine) Advanced Situational Awareness System (ASAS) project supplements, were also supported by National Science Foundation Research Assistantships for High School Students (RAHSS), Research Exeperiences for Undergradauates (REU) and Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) awards. Outcomes include the use of WiGiT innovations for cultural heritage preservation, and requirements including security which were both evaulated in the WiGiT testbed. Building a distributed experimental testbed with 100 partner campuses, companies, and communities including the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Energy and Environmental Systems, Virginia Tech, Tufts University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, school districts, start-up, small and multinational firms, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was itself a significant outcome. Enabling thousands of high school and university students, healthcare, emergency management and other professionals and partner organizations to engage in experiential learning with cognitive radio machine to machine ad hoc network and wireless grid edgeware application demonstrations and testbed experiments. The WiGiT project was through its deistributed tesbed the first to invent, evaluate and test edgeware, and determine technical requirements for a wireless grid. By defining wireless grid open specifications or standards for business, educational and social emergency response uses of edgeware and related tools and techniques. 6 doctoral theses elaborating upon the impact on society beyong science and technology of diverse use cases including healthcare as a service, healthcare workplace as a service, workplace as a service, as well as defining and demonstrating key components of an advanced situational awareness system, as well as distributed and collaborative learning in K-12 and university contexts with wireless grids. Additional key outcomes of the WiGit project are the the refining of open standards (WiGiT Open Specs, or specifications) for wireless grid technical requirements and applications in: - software defined radio/cognitive radio - 'worst case scenario' emergency communication - distributed energy and environment - collaborative high school, university and professional education with ambient information in a wireless grid and - workplace as a service/Bring Your Own Device frameworks developed in cooperation with the information technology industry standards group TM Forum and its Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council. The outcomes of several exemplary WiGiT project research efforts are elaborated upon below, with much more information available in the dozens of articles published by project researchers. Developing and evaluating wireless grid edgeware applications and cognitive radio (software defined radio) ad hoc infrastructureless network technology innovations for applications such as telemedicine professional training for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain injury (TBi) care. A NSF Veterans Research Supplement (VRS)-supported study of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals at 2 major military hospitals completed in 2014 confirmed the value for users of WiGiT project inventions and innovations. At a 95% statistical confidence level, Dr. Dale Meyerrose doctoral thesis study found that new edgeware applications enabling healthcare workplace as a service delivery and use across mobile devices meet the needs of healthcare professionals for private, secure and flexible access to and use of information in a wireless grid. Virginia Tech's Dr. Xuetao Chen’s WiGiT project research outcomes addressed several fundamental problems when users far from each other are restricted in the link quality even though the center users have a better wireless channel. This leads to extra power consumption and unstable computing quality when wireless grids share software resources and computing hardware with users at varying distances from a wireless network node or center point. By considering different wireless link variations and balancing workloads allocated to each device, both power efficiency and computing robustness can be improved to their respective channel qualities. Dr. Chen elaborated his theory and developed the architecture design, algorithms, protocol design, mathematical modeling, and simulations, which together result in viable solutions. Radio and computing resource allocation using a stochastic optimization method was demonstrated. The inter-operation among different wireless interfaces for peer-to-peer connections were also addressed, using a distributed neighbor discovery and cluster synchronization protocol which resolved long-standing fundamental problems throughout the industry; resulting in the first prototype of a wireless grid incorporating these features. The outcome of the Advanced Situational Awareness System Supplement was co-ordinated also with a parallel effort of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Prior emergency communication solutions involved manual configuration and hardware which may not be known or available at time of need. WiGiT open source wiglet solution (non-proprietary application) GridstreamX enables machine to machine and machine to people communicatio, even in extreme 'worst case scenario' conditions. Tyson Brooks doctoral research and peer-reviewed journal articles analyzed wireless grids security and cloud to edge or Internet of Things risk management vulnerabilities.
