CNS-1925534 CCRI: Planning: Collaborative Research: A Software-defined Wireless Communications Network Research Infrastructure for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Research Community

Lead PI: Prof. Song Han    University of Connecticut

PI: Prof. Donald R. Brown    Worcester Polytechnic Institute

PI: Prof. Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo    University of Texas at San Antonio

 

Project Summary

Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems are being increasingly deployed in manufacturing plants to optimize the quality of products and the productivity of manufacturing lines and avoid process anomalies and faults that can lead to subpar performance and safety issues. The stringent requirements of IIoT systems on system-level dependability, timing performance, energy-efficiency, and security pose challenges in their communication fabric design, distributed data management, analysis and decision making, and security protection. This project focuses on the planning activities towards the design and deployment of an innovative software-defined IIoT infrastructure which will serve as the testbed of a community research infrastructure.

The major goal of this project is to take effective community outreach mechanisms to reach out to the relevant CISE research communities to best understand the community needs and their expectations on the proposed IIoT infrastructure. Based on findings from the stakeholder engagements, the infrastructure will be designed to capture the most essential needs of networking and computing capabilities for advanced interconnected manufacturing systems and deployed in representative advanced manufacturing facilities at the participating institutions. This planning project will lay out a solid foundation towards the development of a NEW proposal and enable and boost a large number of IIoT related research projects.

 

Community Testbed under Planning and Development

The research team is working on developing and integrating multiple heterogeneous industrial wireless networks by interconnecting them through a TSN (time-sensitive networking) backbone to form the prototype of the proposed community IIoT testbed. The following figure shows the architecture of the network testbed under planning and development.

The testbed is planned and developed based on the community feedback. You can find the questionnaire here.

 

Survey Articles on IIoT Communication Protocols and Testbeds

[ArXiv] Chuanyu Xue, Tianyu Zhang, Yuanbin Zhou, and Song Han. “Real-Time Scheduling for Time-Sensitive Networking: A Systematic Review and Experimental Study.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.16772, 2023.

[ArXiv] Gang Wang, Tianyu Zhang, Chuanyu Xue, Jiachen Wang, Mark Nixon, Song Han, “Time-Sensitive Networking for Industrial Automation: Challenges, Opportunities, and Directions.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.03691, 2023.

[Technical Report] Tianyu Zhang, Chuanyu Xue, Jiachen Wang, Zelin Yun, Natong Lin, Song Han, “A Survey on Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Testbeds for Connectivity Research.” Technical Report, Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Connecticut, 2023.

 

Classes related to the project

Spring 2023: CSE5300 Advanced Computer Networks@UConn

Fall 2022: SE5402 Architecture of IoT@UConn

Spring 2022: SE5402 Architecture of IoT@UConn