Increased use of Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensor devices is revolutionizing science and engineering applications, such as smart cities and environmental hazard monitoring. These sensors are often deployed in remote and distributed environments and rely on complex data networks that use both wired and wireless communication to stream large volumes of data back for analysis and distribution. Design and management of these complex hybrid networks is a daunting task due to network capacity fluctuations and dynamic data flow characteristics. This project develops a new software-driven network infrastructure to help automate network management of these emerging hybrid sensor networks for science and public service.
This project develops and deploys an operational Software-Defined Networking (SDN) network management and monitoring infrastructure for hybrid wide-area research networks spanning hundreds of kilometers in Nevada for distributed applications in wildfire, climate, and traffic safety. Current practices of inflexible network setup with limited monitoring capability struggles to satisfy ever-increasing science needs, such as on-demand data pipeline creation and quality-of-service satisfaction. Moreover, the project enhances network transparency through deployment of high-precision (i.e., port-, flow-, and packet-level) network monitoring and performance measurement (i.e., PerfSonar) nodes. The project implements a deep-learning-based anomaly detection mechanism to protect sensitive data from cyber attacks.
Integrating SDN with high-precision monitoring into wide-area sensor networks has the potential to accelerate adoption of IoT devices in many science areas by addressing core hybrid WAN (wide-area network) challenges such as routing, troubleshooting, and anomaly detection. Developing these integrations now is critical, because hybrid WAN infrastructures (particularly in non-urban regions) will remain bandwidth-limited relative to data generation devices into the foreseeable future. This project allows University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) to continue leadership in wide-area research IoT systems, expand institutional platforms for hybrid-cloud operations, and scale up key products for communities as part of UNR's land-grant mission.
Any data produced in the context of this project will be made available to the public and maintained throughout the duration of the project and beyond. Developed source code will initially be maintained in a private GitHub repository, which will be released at “https://github.com/UNR-HPN/SDNWideArea†periodically when the codebase becomes stable. The repository will be maintained as part of ongoing support operations by UNR cyberinfrastructure personnel assigned to the infrastructure at the close of the project. Performance monitoring in the project will be associated with regional dashboards as best practices dictate.
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.
