IMR: RI-P: Programmable Closed-loop Measurement Platform for Last-Mile Networks

Today's society relies heavily on various Internet-based services for work, education, health care, and entertainment, and the quality of access (or last-mile) network dictates the quality of experience for these services. The quality of access networks in the US varies across different regions, communities, and demographics, contributing to digital inequities.

Policymakers are interested in bridging this gap; to do so, they require understanding the state of access quality. This collaborative project will explore the design and deployment strategies for a new network measurement and analytics platform that enables policymakers to assess access networks' quality at scale.

This collaborative planning project will bring together researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara and the University of Chicago to explore the feasibility of a programmable and scalable data-collection platform, demonstrate the value of closed-loop data collection with specific use-cases, and evaluate different scaling strategies using the data collected from its residential deployments in Chicago. Additionally, this project will organize a workshop inviting different stakeholders from industry, government, and academia to identify scaling strategies, new features, and concrete use cases for the proposed platform.

The proposed platform can answer questions ranging from the state of the Internet performance and infrastructure in specific neighborhoods to the Internet speeds and performance characteristics required to support special/new applications (e.g., video conferencing, telehealth, etc.). Such capabilities will empower policymakers and other stakeholders, such as networking researchers, network operators, and end users.

It is envisioned that the open-source tools, methods, and data will become the standard that these organizations rely on to both assess the nature of problems in Internet access networks, as well as to assess the effectiveness of various policy interventions, programs, and infrastructure investments, and so forth. Project website: https://pinetrics.cs.ucsb.edu/

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.