The Wisconsin Roaming Edge (WiRE) project aims to support the development of novel and important mobile applications -- particularly those in the domain of transportation. The key to the project is the creation of a new computing platform, termed the "roaming edge", which consists of substantial computational resources (including processors, memory, storage devices, and sensors) within mobile transportation platforms (such as busses and automobiles). The WiRE project will make these resources available to multiple applications in a secure and robust fashion, and, by providing low-latency and high-bandwidth access to data and computation, enable the creation of new classes of mobile applications. This research is about providing strong security and privacy while delivering high levels of performance.
The WiRE project leverages recent advances in serverless computing, and four major research challenges -- the construction of a hardware-based secure execution environment, fine-grained and user-tunable privacy controls, intelligent data-driven scheduling of computation, and realistic scenario simulation for fast application prototyping. These form the core intellectual thrusts of the work. All software will be made available via open-source licenses, thus enabling the broader community (both academic and industrial) to benefit from and contribute to the effort. The WiRE project endeavors to transform how future generations of mobile applications are developed and deployed, particularly in the emerging field of intelligent transportation.
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.
