Agile, data based spectrum management for virtualization and slicing of wireless networks
Abstract
Tactical units in battlefields and other situations tend to be ad-hoc in nature and would greatly benefit from being able to deploy communication systems rapidly and securely. While efforts have been put into achieving quick and reliable communication by relying on different ways to bring the communication infrastructure to the deployment location itself, there is still an opportunity to further improve communication efficiency by integrating the tactical units with the preexisting network infrastructures, including the commercial networks and that of the coalition partners. For instance, 5G and beyond network will provide great amount of bandwidth, energy efficiency, low latency, and communication reliability. However, integrating an ad-hoc communication system into such pre-existing deployment involves creating new methods that will make it easier and efficient for such entities to integrate securely with the commercial networks like 5G. Some of the promising directions of investigation, that would help such ad-hoc military deployments take advantage of commercial softwarized/virtualized, off-the-shelf, preexisting deployments, include leveraging programmability (in control planes with Software Defined Networking, in physical layer with Software Defined Radio, and in data plane with P4) to orchestrate networked systems, opportunistically harnessing the wireless bandwidth by sensing and sharing the available spectrum, making use of the Cloud-Edge infrastructures that guarantee higher computational capabilities with lower latency, and using machine-learning driven intelligent systems that will understand the environment and suggest the optimal decisions. The goal of this project is to build a holistic 5G deployment alongside a cloud-edge environment, which will allow our system to emulate a tactical military deployment. The wireless communication system will consist of 5G cloud-native RAN deployment with network core and SDR enabled base station, with different network functions virtualized. This will further be enhanced with spectrum analysis systems. Various computational entities will serve to provide an edge-cloud research environment, along with the resources for smart network-building through machine learning methods. The IoT devices implemented in our testbed will help experiment with the tactical and other deployments that are becoming more and more prevalent, i.e., drones and augmented reality devices. Under this testbed, we will be able to experiment for our various research thrusts, including on dynamic spectrum sensing and sharing for optimized network slicing, scaling and placement of virtual network functions for ad-hoc deployments, and more. Also, these projects will lead to educational benefits: Students and young researches will be trained with various cutting-edge network technologies across computer science and electrical engineering.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 19, 2023
- Source ID
- W911NF2310064
Entities
People
- Leandros Tassiulas
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- United States Army
- Yale University