Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Medium: IoCT: System Mechanisms for Enabling an Internet of Collaborative Things

The rapid growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices points to a future with trillions of devices deployed at a planetary scale for use in diverse application domains, ranging from healthcare, to transportation, to energy, to manufacturing, to environmental sensing, and more. Such growth poses significant challenges. First, due to the relatively slower growth of cloud infrastructure, the current practice of offloading data from IoT devices for computing at cloud servers will not be sustainable due to scaling challenges.

Second, future IoT devices will operate in environments where they will host multiple applications simultaneously and move across physical spaces with different owners, thus requiring flexible sharing across trust domains of sensing, processing, communication, and action resources present in the devices and the physical spaces. Addressing these emerging challenges requires a radical rethinking of the current device-edge-cloud architecture of IoT systems.

In this project, the researchers are exploring a new architecture approach called the “Internet of Collaborating Things” (IoCT). In IoCT, instead of offloading device data to edge and cloud servers, the application computation is distributed across an amorphous collection of interconnected IoT devices that produce and consume data, while harnessing emerging on-device compute accelerators.

The project will address three key challenges associated with the IoCT vision: (i) secure multitenancy on resource-constrained IoT devices; (ii) secure collaboration among IoT devices; and (iii) resilient management of resources distributed across IoT devices and the spaces they are operating in.

The societal benefits of the project are twofold. First, it will provide the foundations for a massive-scale IoT infrastructure, without the large cost and energy footprint associated with using traditional server infrastructure. Second, it will allow IoT applications involving rich high-dimensional sensors and sophisticated physical control to be run anywhere by securely harnessing resources present in nearby devices and physical spaces.

This includes autonomous urban robots interacting in complex manners with social spaces and built environments. Additionally, the project team will undertake specific broader impact activities to advance education, transition technology, and broaden participation. In particular, for creating and nurturing an IoCT community of researchers and practitioners, the project team will release open-source software, create experimental testbeds, organize workshops, and contribute to broadening participation in computing through outreach to local high schools using two pre-college programs: the Los Angeles Computing Circle at UCLA and the Summer Turing Institute at UMass Amherst.

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.