Computer scientists create virtual lab to test experimental weather sensor network
A group of Computer Science researchers recently joined with 61 other teams nationwide to participate in building and deploying a virtual laboratory funded by the National Science Foundation for experimenting with future Internet architectures, or networks.
David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy and Michael Zink were awarded a $535,000 National Science Foundation grant to continue work on a project known as the Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI), managed by BBN Technologies of Boston, who received $10.5 million from NSF. Within a few weeks, academic/industry teams will conduct internet-based experiments in an important first test of the network at a GENI conference, beginning Nov. 16 in Salt Lake City, according to Irwin.
“By building a shared facility that spans more than 60 other research networks across the country, GENI makes it possible for us to study how to build faster, more secure, and more reliable Internets than today’s familiar Internet,” says Irwin.
One of the campus GENI teams is called ViSE, for Virtualized Sensing Environment, which includes a movable camera and steerable weather radars on campus. ViSE will be integrated with, and shares a mission to “revolutionize the way we observe, understand, and predict hazardous weather” with the other sensor network on campus, known as CASA, for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere. Together they’ll deploy computers at many locations in the Amherst area, including on mountain-top fire towers and buildings on campus. These computers will connect to both short-range weather radars and an array of other sensors, and communicate wirelessly using long-distance antennas.
This network, known as a testbed, will allow researchers to experiment with using sensors such as weather radars, to improve systems for predicting and detecting dangerous weather such as tornadoes. An immediate goal is to connect these sensing systems with emerging cloud computing platforms offered by companies such as Amazon.
“New innovation in sensing systems goes hand-in-hand with new innovation in the Internet and cloud computing, since sensors must send their data over the Internet to the computers that ultimately process the data to accurately predict when and where hazardous weather exists,” Irwin explains.
He says the goal is not to develop new specialized detection techniques, but to develop an open, accessible, shared public facility that other researchers can use to test out their own ideas. “Our goal, and GENI’s, is not to develop the single best sensing system or new Internet architecture, but to develop a shared testbed, where students and researchers from across the country can build and experiment with their own new approaches to improving sensing systems by integrating them with the new Internet technologies GENI enables.”
Testbed users will be able to request “virtualized” access to each computer and its sensors. Though the testbed’s computers and sensors are shared, each user will have the illusion that they are the only person using them. Virtualization enables a high degree of multi-user sharing that supports many researchers simultaneously without sacrificing the necessary freedom each researcher requires to develop and experiment with radical new approaches.
Because GENI is a nationwide facility, the ViSE testbed will coordinate with GENI’s nationwide clearinghouse to allow researchers access to experimental testbeds and networks, such as Internet2, that span the country and cut across multiple technologies beyond sensing systems. As the national network begins operation this fall, scientists will be able to run experiments to address a wide variety of problems in communications, networking, distributed systems, cyber-security, networked services and applications in a far more realistic way than they can today.
Irwin, Shenoy and Zink say their overall goal is to “build and operate an open testbed that enables scientists to rethink how vast networks of sensing systems use the Internet and vice-versa.”
November 5, 2009.
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