This proposal presents CHRONOS - Cloud based Hybrid RF-Optical Network Over Synchronous links. The primary goal of this project is to design, build and maintain a multi-node, heterogeneous, wideband, scalable, hybrid and synchronous Cloud Radio Access Network (Cloud RAN or C-RAN), specifically to support high throughput wireless access for emerging applications like Virtual Reality (VR), Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), 3D broadcast video, tele-surgery, etc. The combination of tight synchrony and heterogeneity among the network constituents make CHRONOS radically different and foundational to investigate previously unexplored research problems in wireless networking and communication. This infrastructure cuts across multiple domains including wireless networks, digital communication, signal processing, optical communication, hardware and software architectures and parallel processing. In addition to global technological and social impact, students at the state University at Albany will be trained using this testbed. The highly diversified student body in the university includes traditionally underrepresented communities, who will greatly benefit from hands-on workshops, seminars, summer programs and student interest groups hosted by the researchers throughout the duration of the project. The testbed will not only enable research at Albany, but will also foster long-term collaborations beyond the campus as well.
CHRONOS enhances the capabilities of conventional C-RAN in multiple directions by integrating synchronous radio frequency and optical links. The long term goal of this project is to utilize the testbed to enable practical research in wireless and optical communication with emphasis on new hardware and software architectures for signal processing. Specifically, this project will 1) develop baseband transceiver in multi-field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based cloud platform, edge nodes as well as mobile terminals to enable high bandwidth communication, 2) interface between the cloud and the edge nodes to split edge-cloud processing, 3) partition between FPGA and graphical processing unit (GPU) co-processor for parallelism in baseband, and 4) enable dynamic reconfiguration for digital signal processing (DSP) modules as required by applications. The key architectural advantage of CHRONOS is the decoupling of baseband signal processing from the front end allowing for complex, joint processing of signals from spatially distributed radio units. It also optimizes real-time performance by having computation capabilities at the network edge while trading off energy consumption. Spatially distributed antenna geometry alleviates the inefficiencies imposed by co-located antennas in existing communication methods. It also advances the research in virtual cloud platforms that support partial reconfiguration of FPGA to scale the DSP tasks based on demand. These efforts in multiple fundamental domains are tightly coupled and require close interaction to realize the full potential of this infrastructure.
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.
