The Aether Plug Project
Figure 1. Evolving Information Technology Platform
The exponential growth in the number of connected devices, most of them wirelessly, is projected by some to continue unabated. By this forecast, in the year 2020 there could be more than 1000 connected devices per person on Earth. The information technology infrastructure is moving away from the desktop/laptop model towards much more numerous ubiquitously distributed (and often mobile) embedded systems and access devices communicating both with each other and with centralized servers (the infrastructural core), see Figure 1. This would enable the advent of truly ubiquitous communication and could fundamentally change the ways we interact with and live in this information rich world. One possible outcome is the wide-scale emergence of heterogeneous Societal Information – Technology Systems, which are distributed system of sensors, mobile devices, compute and control engines, and actuators that work together to address a number of major challenges affecting our daily lives. Examples are automotive safety, traffic management, environmental control and safety protection in green buildings, distributed health monitoring, and power-distribution with decentralized energy generation. However, the prospects of these transformative opportunities may be doomed by the current deficiencies of wireless technologies, specifically the lack of reliability and trustworthiness.
These deficiencies are not a mere matter of perception: there are three interlocking barriers that stand in the way of the Aether-Plug vision: the interference barrier, the regulatory barrier, and the economic/business-model barrier. Technology alone cannot solve the problems, nor can it be solved by some regulatory quick-fix. Thus, it is all but certain that the evolutionary processes that currently drive the wireless industry will fail to deliver an adequate solution. Instead, a coordinated and holistic attack on these barriers is needed, allowing for an in-depth understanding and exploration of the fundamental trade-off mechanisms. This in turn will allow wireless platforms to reach their true potential. The goal of the Aether-Plug project is to capture the desired abstraction of a universally accessible and always-available wireless interconnect medium with virtually unconditional reliability. There are four aspects of the Aether-Plug project:
- Advanced Wireless Technologies
- Policies and Business Models
- Connectivity Brokerage
- Trust and Security
We will also implement a relevant, manageable and scalable proof-of-concept testbed to demonstrate the Aether-Plug vision and its goals.
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