September 17, 2004
HPWREN receives new award from the National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced a
four-year award (NSF number 0426879) as a follow-up to the currently
NSF-funded High Performance Wireless and Research Network (HPWREN),
which has been created and expanded over the past four years. This
new award, in response to the Information Technology Reseach
solicitation, has a strong research agenda on quality of service,
but is also viewed a followon to the existing HPWREN award, and is
titled "Integration and Analysis of Reliable Networking for Remote
Science, Education, and First Responders."
The new project will be part of the HPWREN program, and conduct
systemic interdisciplinary and multi-institutional research regarding
the quality of service achievable by a highly functional wireless
cyberinfrastructure environment. While doing so, it addresses several
diverse scientific networking predictability needs for rural and
remote areas. Examples include:
Time-critical astronomical observations of faint moving and transient
events that require extremely fast optical follow-up to determine
accurate location, and permit rapid spectroscopic analysis before
the transient event disappears;
Strict real-time requirements for earthquake sensor data outrunning
a seismic shock wave for advance warning systems;
Other remote research, such as sensors at biological field stations;
Rapidly deployable and reliable sensor and human-interface networks
for real-life crisis management situations;
Education related activities, including with rural Native American
reservations
A significant network measurement and analysis component for
this experiment based deployment into a living laboratory complements
the activity and focuses on these cross-cutting applications to
understand their requirements and reactions to the wireless network,
with results then being used for the network parameterization. The
already implemented HPWREN network will be made available as a
large-scale systemic platform with its diverse and collaborative
interdisciplinary and multi-institutional applications.
The network and the applications to be studied are conducive to
this type of systemic research, because they can be controlled,
programmed, measured, and analyzed within specified parameters. The
goals of the research are:
To better understand and enhance the complex end-to-end data
communications requirements engendered in remote locations by
various long-term and ad-hoc situations, and
To develop improved design strategies for reliable distributed
network systems that span the urban-rural interface.
As with the original HPWREN award, Hans-Werner Braun of the UCSD
San Diego Supercomputer Center is the Principal Investigator, with
Frank Vernon of the UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography being
Co-Principal Investigator. Richard Ellis, director of the California
Institute of Technology Optical Observatories, and Ron Serabia,
former Fire Captain with the California Department of Forestry and
Fire Protection, will be Collaborating Investigators for this
project.
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