HPWREN 2021 - 2022 Accomplishments

February 19, 2023

This is a summary of the HPWREN 2021 and 2022 accomplishments. The impact of the 2020 Covid outbreak continued to be felt throughout 2021, while all but diminishing during 2022. Despite related challenges,  HPWREN continued to make good progress, including increased bandwidth and network reach, as well as updated technologies. HPWREN accomplishments during this period, in addition to ongoing routine maintenance and repair of infrastructure, included the build out of new camera and network backbone sites with new Ubiquiti and Siae radio equipment, expansions beyond San Diego County into Orange and Riverside counties, and major upgrades to  our networking and storage infrastructure. This ultimately culminated in the adoption of AWS cloud storage services.


I. Awards and grants


II. HPWREN Sensor Data Use Cases

HPWREN enables end users to utilize the image and collected sensor data to create interesting results. Access to HPWREN data archives is outlined at http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/news/20210318/  Some of the  examples include:


III. ASAPNET

Advanced Situational Awareness for Public Safety Network (ASAPNet) is a wireless network primarily serving fire stations in remote areas of San Diego County. ASAPNet is an extension to and utilizes UCSD's High Performance Wireless Research Network (HPWREN) as the "backbone" wide area network. Currently ASAPNet comprises 56 fire stations, and 12 relay sites originating from 19 mountaintops in San Diego County.


IV. Public Safety Service Improvements

New back county resource centers were established by SDG&E and provided Internet access by HPWREN. These Community centers are activated as part of the Public Safety Program when power is dropped in the area during red flag warnings. These Community Centers include:

From a wildfire observation perspective, many existing sites received new and/or upgraded cameras, and new sensor sites were added to the network. In some cases radio links of existing sites were upgraded as well. In addition, the HPWREN regional wireless backbone underwent numerous expansions.


In support of the growing ALERTCalifornia community, HPWREN provides high quality Internet connectivity using fixed wide area wireless technology connected to multiple regional Internet gateways at sites in San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and Santa Barbara Counties. In partnership with ALERTCalifornia and LA City Fire Department, the following new camera sites were deployed in the Santa Monica Mountains:

In partnership with ALERTCalifornia, the following new camera sites were above the Owens Valley:

HPWREN new or upgraded camera sites, by region, include:

V. IT Infrastructure Improvements

HPWREN has been systematically upgrading wireless network radios to support additional throughput and broader connectivity (see Section IV). Worth noting is the migration to more modern Siae Microwave communications equipment on more than a dozen links.

On the storage front, numerous storage evaluations and improvements have taken place. Being significantly pressed for image capture (near term) storage, incremental storage of around 100 Terabyte was added to our archival servers.

We invested in additional local storage servers and investigated options for building a new distributed storage system. Ultimately, we decided to use our new server hardware to provide improved processing and storage power for our camera image fetch workflows (currently done predominately on VMs). This addresses our shorter term storage needs. We are now adopting cloud storage for our longer term storage requirements. Adoption of AWS Cloud storage, enabled via Calit2, was begun to provide regional storage independence and high availability to our users. The system has been designed and initially adopted in late 2022 for bulk storage. The new storage system will initially host archival data and eventually provide various web accessible data services, including to students.

Website improvements this year include significant improvements in performance and navigation. The camera banner page is more responsive to screen changes such as resizing or rotation, adding more support for various device types, sizes and display capabilities. The "details" pointers refer to more information about the camera or camera collage at specific sites. The cameras are now sorted alphabetically, and different sort order options will be added over time.

HPWREN routers at SDSC/UCSD and UCI have been upgraded to 2x20GigE throughput capabilities.

We have incorporated Netbox among our software tools to help keep track of various software, hardware and networking configurations.


VI. Public Outreach

The many ways we have reached out to the public this period include:


VII. Research and Development

HPWREN infrastructure supports a variety of research and education projects and we are always looking for new ways to do things or new capabilities to add. The more significant activities this period include:


VIII. Anticipated 2023 Activities

Projects left over from 2021/2022 include