The growing capabilities of sensing, computing and communication devices are leading to an explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures. In the meantime, advances in technologies such as autonomous systems and artificial intelligence promise enormous economic and societal benefits. Naturally, it is desirable to deploy these technologies in IoT infrastructures. However, such deployments present daunting changes for increasingly scaled-up IoT infrastructures in mission-critical applications such as medical, energy, transportation, and industrial-automation systems. These challenges stem from several major aspects in terms of scalability. First, the number of edge devices can be enormous, often in the order of billions, which makes centralized management infeasible. Second, there are multiple layers of heterogeneity. An IoT system can consist of heterogeneous computing subsystems; each subsystem can have heterogeneous computing devices; and each single device can be composed of different kinds of computing components. Third, mission-critical applications have stringent requirements in correctness, resilience, timeliness, security and safety. It is difficult for a large-scale IoT system to satisfy these requirements due to increasing opportunities for adversarial activity.
To tackle these challenges, this project aims to develop a cross-layer and full hardware/software stack solution, referred to as the S3-IoT framework, for the design and deployment of scalable, secure, and smart mission-critical IoT systems. The S3-IoT framework will span three different computation layers, including data centers, gateways/aggregators, and edge devices, and cover four research foci, i.e., resource management, security and privacy, computer architecture/systems, and algorithms. In this planning project, an initial version of the S3-IoT framework will be developed. The S3-IoT framework will (i) leverage a layered structure - data centers, gateways/aggregators, and edge devices to accommodate the huge number of edge devices; (ii) develop cross-layer techniques to deal with the heterogeneity among these layers; and (iii) propose hardware and software co-design approaches that embrace the heterogeneity among computing components to improve the performance of all components within an individual layer. The S3-IoT framework will be evaluated by developing simulators with the layered structure as well as a small scale, comprehensive experimental testbed. The success of this planning project will lead to a convincing path to effective deployment of mission-critical IoT systems and infrastructures, particularly in terms of improving resilience to environmental uncertainties, system internal errors and faults, and malicious attacks.
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.
