NSF Award
1137568
The goal of this project is to build a distributed experimentation infrastructure spanning multiple sites in the US and Europe that is uniquely positioned to facilitate experimental research on global scale mobile services. The infrastructure would consist of cameras and touch-screen displays at different locations in New York and Madison as well as in CERTH and IBBT In Europe, allowing wireless based connectivity for its users through a layer 2 tunnel.<br/><br/>This project will enable research in distributed mobile services at a global scale. The research questions revolve around tradeoffs in placing computation across diverse locations around the globe and how they should be best replicated to optimize between performance latencies, bandwidth consumed and operational costs of such a service. The PIs are considering an application that they call a distributed wall where each site has a number or sensors and actuators, i.e. motion-detecting cameras and displays. A core local computational task is to quickly detect individuals and focus the cameras on them. As the number of sites grows, a key challenge for the application developers is to determine how and when to provision servers in different parts of the globe to optimize on the key experimental metrics. The proposed outcomes include better understanding of distributed deployment of global scale mobile services.<br/><br/>The project also has significant educational impact. The PIs will incorporate learnings from the project into the classroom through various networking and wireless communication courses at the respective universities. In addition, this project will bring students together from several countries to work together on a single project. The students will travel to the remote locations to give them exposure to research in different institutions across different countries with different research cultures and approaches to addressing networking research.
