NSF Award
1721284
The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is a new disruptive approach to enable the digital transformation of US industrial infrastructure through extreme low latency, highly reliable and secure wireless networks. The proposal aligns closely with U.S. government programs such as Manufacturing USA and the National Robotics Initiative. The World Economic Forum reported recently that manufacturing has been immensely important to the prosperity of nations. This has never been more true than right now as countries compete to make huge investments in the digital transformation process of their manufacturing firms. The innovation provides significant advancement that is expected to boost U.S. worker productivity, advance wireless innovation and increase cost savings and business agility. The Industrial Internet of Things drives new investment in automated factories, industrial digital networks and integration with real-time edge computing. Data expansion at the edge of today's networks are new challenges for industrial firms that seek to deploy flexible and economically viable digital infrastructure. The company provides an innovative solution that enables wireless edge computing. Instead of expensive and inflexible wired networks, this new technology unlocks the full potential of wireless sensor networks for automation and control systems. <br/><br/>The proposed project will demonstrate the company's concept of ultra-secure, highly reliable, time-sensitive/synchronized wireless protocol for Industrial IoT markets. The novel system design is a general purpose, extremely low latency, wireless communications link that supports real-time connection to industrial devices. The company's technology operates chaos-based spread spectrum communications links, functional chaos-based IIoT sub-nets with anticipated scalability of a plurality of sub-nets operating within unlicensed bands. Enabling an extreme precision time synchronization is critical to industrial systems and network applications in time-sensitive edge computing networks. To date, standard access technologies such as Ethernet are not deterministic and clock synchronization protocols are fundamentally limited by the characteristics of packet switching or efficient access to reliable clocks. In particular, legacy network's jitter, packet buffering and scheduling in switches and network stack overheads add non-deterministic variances to the round trip time, which must be accurately measured to synchronize clocks. This proposal is for a wireless-based synchronization technology that uses more granular timing mechanisms to achieve nanosecond precision. The company introduces a clock synchronization protocol that uses wireless chaotic waveforms that connects to network devices for decentralized clock synchronization. This eliminates the need for wires and non-deterministic elements in clock synchronization protocols.
