This is the Ohio University (subcontractor) project webpage for the Dept. of Commerce NIST grant “DistressNet-NG: Resilient Mobile Broadband Communication and Edge Computing for FirstNet”. The PI is Prof. Radu Stoleru at Texas A&M and the co-PI is Dr. Walt Magnussen @ Texas A&M.

Overview

Public safety communications requires stricter guarantees from the network than commodity Internet. At the same time, communications infrastructure is not readily available during the response to an incident or disaster. To further exacerbate the problem, this infrastructure is cost prohibitive to deploy even for multi national corporations (in terms of both the required spectrum as well as CAPEX and OPEX). These three reasons are the key drivers behind public safety communications research.

In this project, we propose to enhance the resilience of both public safety mission critical systems and services in the face of connectivity challenges by developing fault tolerant, energy efficient and load balanced solutions for mobile broadband communication and mobile edge computing solutions. DistressNet-NG provides a scalable and resilient wireless interconnection fabric for first responder communication equipment. A novel mobile edge computing service pushes cloud computing beyond the network edge and onto the user equipment itself. Smartphones carried by first responders are capable of performing analytics on shared data using the computing and storage power of nearby devices, eliminating the need for constant high capacity connections to the Internet. In order to accelerate this process, several high performance computing nodes that are built using COTS components can be deployed in the area.

These devices collaborative to offer LTE-as-a-Service: the functional elements in the backhaul and RAN such as eNodeB, P-GW, S-GW, MME, HSS etc. can are autonomously created and destroyed in response to communication demand. We are investigating the following five research thrusts: Efficient and Resilient Fully Wireless Backhaul, where SCTP/TCP parameter tuning algorithms are explored; Decentralized LTE/IMS - Towards LTE-as-a-Service, where an algorithm to optimally spawn and despawn LTE functional elements is designed.

Personnel

Products

  1. A. Saadou, H. Chenji,
    “Optimizing Situational Awareness in Disaster Response Networks”
    in IEEE Access, vol. 6, pp. 24625-24638, 2018.
    doi