MARCY, N.Y. — Faculty at SUNY Polytechnic Institute and the University at Buffalo (UB) have partnered on a project called SUNY OpenIoTLab: The SUNY Laboratory Federation for Wireless Intelligent Internet of Things. The project received a $60,000 SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology grant. The initiative will develop UnionLabs, an open, cloud-enabled federation of heterogeneous testbeds for […]
MARCY, N.Y. — Faculty at SUNY Polytechnic Institute and the University at Buffalo (UB) have partnered on a project called SUNY OpenIoTLab: The SUNY Laboratory Federation for Wireless Intelligent Internet of Things.
The project received a $60,000 SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology grant. The initiative will develop UnionLabs, an open, cloud-enabled federation of heterogeneous testbeds for sharing data, code, software, and hardware resources for research in next-generation networks and wireless Internet of Things.
The joint effort is led by UB’s Zhangyu Guan and Nicholas Mastronarde, along with SUNY Poly Associate Professor Timothy E. Busch of the electrical and computer engineering program. Other key project personnel include associate professors Michael J. Medley, Daniel Benincasa, and Arjun Singh with Adjunct Professor Chester Wright.
“Given the evolution of wireless network systems in recent years and the impact on our daily lives, there is a great need for a shared resource for collaboration, education, and experimentation of these systems,” Busch said in a press release. “Significant efforts have been made to fill the void, and this project between SUNY Poly and the University at Buffalo is yet another step forward. We are grateful for this grant and for the support we have received from our peers, project partners, and institutions.”
The proposed UnionLabs initiative will provide the Air Force, UB, and the wireless community an open experimental ecosystem where researchers and engineers can collaborate and share resources. Once deployed, UnionLabs would serve as the global entry for academia, the U.S. Department of Defense, and industrial researchers to conduct experimental research in the field of next-generation networks and wireless Internet of Things.
UnionLabs’ objectives include: creating a collaborative campaign to democratize access to wireless research testbeds with heterogeneous hardware resources and network environments spanning aerial, ground, underwater, and underground domains, and in a wide range of frequency bands, from sub-6 GHz up to the mmWave and terahertz bands, per the release. It also seeks to deploy a federation plane that will be hosted in the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud to bridge the testbeds and users and enable researchers to share, remotely access, and control their resources and conduct experiments collaboratively via a unified user interface. Another goal is to build a two-tier cloud, comprising a public cloud powered by AWS and edge computing resources at individual wireless systems to allow researchers to share experimental datasets, wireless communication, networking and sensing algorithms/code, and evaluate them over heterogeneous testbeds.
UnionLabs’ federation plane APIs will be made available for other wireless testbeds to join the federation. The team also plans to eventually commercialize it by launching a startup.
