With food sourced from every part of the country and from around the world, food supply chains are extremely complex pathways from farm to the table. Unfortunately, up to 20-30% of the fresh food is spoiled by the time it reaches the customer in US, and a similar amount is further thrown away by the customers at least partly due to lack of freshness. Thus, understanding food networks and devising mechanisms to reduce losses can have huge economic and environmental impact. The purpose of this project is to understand and improve food distribution networks by applying and extending techniques from the science of computer networking, which can handle tremendous amounts of complexity beyond the scales seen in food networks. The unique characteristics of food networks will require significant innovations beyond the state of the art in computer networking and thus will provide valuable results for novel and emerging complex computer networks as well.
The design and optimization of a "food network" poses many challenges and requires innovations that are expected to benefit both food networks and computer networks. In particular, food network involve unique 'rotting packets' (continuous decrease in quality of the package contents), a demand-driven and quality-centric delivery and distribution, in-network bundling/unbundling of 'packets', mixing of a large variety of 'payloads', and dynamic changes to packet sources and types. The purpose of this proposal is to address these challenges and lay the foundation for a systematic design and operation of food networks. Since many of these challenges are relevant to computer networks as well, the proposed work will consider them in that context as well. In particular, the research will examine issues relating to in-network bundling/unbundling of packets, content based (rather than address based) routing/distribution, QoS aware forwarding of multi-modal data, and disruption tolerant operation. The research will also allow for better management of the food networks in the face of emerging trends in maximal utilization of seasonal and local foods which requires significant flexibility and dynamic configurability in the food sourcing and distribution networks.
