We propose AERPAW: Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless, a first-of-its-kind aerial wireless experimentation platform to be developed in close partnership between NCSU, Wireless Research Center of North Carolina (WRCNC), Mississippi State University (MSU), University of South Carolina (USC), City of Raleigh, Town of Cary, Town of Holly Springs, North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT), and numerous other project partners. With a major focus being on aerial communications within low altitude airspace, AERPAW will develop a software defined, reproducible, and open-access advanced wireless platform with experimentation features spanning 5G technologies and beyond. NCSU, USC, and MSU researchers have existing UAS experimentation capabilities and ongoing experimental research activities involving wireless technologies spanning software defined radios (SDRs), LTE, WiFi, ultra-wideband (UWB), IoT, and millimeter wave (mmWave), which will form the initial baseline framework for the AERPAW platform. To deploy AERPAW, NCSU will work closely with NCDOT������������������s Integration Pilot Program, a three-year FAA project that allows BVLOS UAS experimentation for medical supply delivery in North Carolina, in close collaboration with NCSU, several UAS companies, municipalities, and a medical institution. Initial flight tests have already started within the Raleigh area, and will be expanding to other parts of the state in 2019 and beyond. Any additional FAA permits, as necessary, will be secured by AERPAW team in close collaboration with NCDOT.

The explosive growth in bandwidth represented by advances in optical communication and networking technologies has underpinned the increasing reach and reliability of the Internet in the last two decades. However, the potential impact of increasingly sophisticated recent advances in optical technology, such as rapid switching and elastic wavelengths have not yet been realized. The main cause of this is that such technology, while possible to integrate into the data plane of planetary networking, is difficult to accommodate in the current planning, management, and control strategies. We propose in this project to work hand-in-hand with collaborating researchers from NICT, Japan, who are working to realize a novel technology of hybrid optical packet/circuit switching. Such a technology could be immensely useful to large transport network operators, but there are no existing algorithms that can easily determine how a provider can provision their resources between the circuit and packet possibilities on an ongoing dynamic basis. We envision a novel approach to this problem, where we utilize the concept of a "choice marketplace" that allows sophisticated rendezvous semantics between customer and provider, and allows them to cooperatively guide network resource provisioning to dynamically fulfill network objectives such as maximizing performance received by network traffic. Our approach also allows balancing of various objectives, such as network utilization, latency, and the increasingly important metric of energy expenditure in the network.

Cognitive radio is an emerging advanced radio technology in wireless access, with many promising benefits including dynamic spectrum sharing, robust cross-layer adaptation, and collaborative networking. Opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) is at the core of cognitive radio technologies, which has received great attention recently, focusing on improving spectrum utilization efficiency and reliability. However, the state-of-the-art still suffers from one severe security vulnerability, which has been largely overlooked by the research community so far. That is, a malicious jammer can always disrupt the legitimate network communication by leveraging the public-available channel statistic information to effectively jam the channels and thus lead to serious spectrum underutilization. In this proposal, we propose to address the challenge of effective anti-jamming communication in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). We propose a multiple lines of defense approach, which considers and integrates defense technologies from different dimensions, including frequency hopping, power control, cooperative communication, and signal processing. The proposed defense approach enables both reactive and proactive protection, from evading jammers to competing against jammers, and to expelling jamming signals, and thus guarantees effective anti-jamming communication under a variety of network environments.

Wireless security is receiving increasing attention as wireless systems become a key component in our daily life as well as critical cyber-physical systems. Recent progress in this area exploits physical layer characteristics to offer enhanced and sometimes the only available security mechanisms. The success of such security mechanisms depends crucially on the correct modeling of underlying wireless propagation. It is widely accepted that wireless channels decorrelate fast over space, and half a wavelength is the key distance metric used in existing wireless physical layer security mechanisms for security assurance. We believe that this channel correlation model is incorrect in general: it leads to wrong hypothesis about the inference capability of a passive adversary and results in false sense of security, which will expose the legitimate systems to severe threats with little awareness. In this project, we seek to understand the fundamental limits in passive inference of wireless channel characteristics, and further advance our knowledge and practice in wireless security.

This project builds on the SILO project that started in 2006 to design a new architecture for the Internet. In this new project, we will collaborate with teams of researchers from the University of Kentucky, the University of Massachusetts, and RENCI, to design critical parts of a new architecture for the Internet that will support the flexible use of widely applicable information transport and transformation modules to create good solutions for specific communication applications. The key idea is to allow a network to offer information transformation services at the edge or in the core transparently to the application, and creating a framework in which application can issue a request not only for communication but for specific reusable services. We also propose research tasks that will enable network virtualization and isolation seamlessly at many levels, currently a difficult but highly relevant problem in practical networking.

Networking Infrastructure, equipment and implementation grant

This program will establish a national Secure Open Systems Institute (SOSI), located on North Carolina State's premier Centennial Campus that will be a global center for Open Systems security research and development.

The goal of this project is to develop and deploy a GENI instrumentation framework, integrate it into one of thecfive control framework prototypes, and develop a set of experimenter capabilities to enable cross-layer experimentation in the optical substrate.

This proposal proposes to build an outdoor wireless mesh testbed comprised of a large number of low-cost experimental fabricated nodes and a small number of commercially available nodes. The testbed will be built in two stages: in the first stage, nodes placed on pushcarts will be temporarily placed outdoors for trials and tests; in the second phase, permanent antenna placements will be installed on equipment poles over a large area of the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University. The testbed will leverage experience of, as well as enable the research of NCSU researchers participating in the Secure Open Systems Institute (SOSI), currently engaged in DoD, NSF, and other projects. Current and envisaged research activities of SOSI researchers address secure and redundant routing, energy-efficient routing, topology control, localization, cross-layer optimization, security and performance of SIP and VoIP, secure virtualization of network and compute resources, social networking. The proposed testbed will provide realistic large-scale outdoor wireless network environments for evaluating and validating the ideas, protocols and systems conceived from these activities. The data and experience gained from operating and managing a real network environment will also provide practical insights for students and researchers on the operation of large-scale heterogeneous mesh networks that help identify new security and performance problems and develop their practical solutions.

The objective of this project is to formulate a formal framework for a non-layered internetworking architecture in which complex protocols are composed from elemental functional blocks in a configurable manner, and to demonstrate its potential by developing proof-of-concept prototypes. We propose a new internetworking architecture that represents a significant departure from current philosophy. Building upon our experience with the design and prototyping of the Just-in-Time protocol suite, we outline a networking framework consisting of (1) building blocks of fine-grain functionality, (2) explicit support for combining elemental blocks into highly configurable complex protocols, and (3) control elements to facilitate (what is currently referred to as) cross-layer interactions. We take a holistic view of network design, allowing applications to work harmoniously with the network architecture and physical layers to select the most appropriate functional blocks and tune their behavior so as to meet the application's needs within resource availability constraints. The proposed architecture is flexible and extensible so as to foster innovation and accommodate change, it supports network convergence, it allows for the integration of security features at any point in (what is now referred to as) the networking stack, and it is positioned to take advantage of hardware-based performance-enhancing techniques. Specific goals of the proposed research include the following: ? We will define a new architectural framework for the future Internet that uses fine-grain functional building blocks rather than the current coarse-grain layers. ? We will develop and implement mechanisms and algorithms for composing complex communication tasks from the fundamental building blocks. ? We will create prototype implementations of the proposed architecture to demonstrate its effectiveness. ? We will incorporate the results of our research into our educational activities so as to engage a wide range of students and create opportunities for underrepresented groups in computer science.