NSF funds development of an Open Source 5G Standalone software stack

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding a consortium of 35 leading wireless companies and associations to develop an Open Source 5G Standalone software stack.

The OpenAirX-Labs (OAX) project, which is part of the NSF's Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) Project Office, is focused on the development, testing, and integration of the OpenAirInterface (OAI) Software Alliance's open source 5G standalone software stack. It is the newest resource in the PAWR program, a public-private partnership promoting wireless research through the development of multiple outdoor, large-scale wireless testbeds across the U.S.

Founding industry partners for OAX include Facebook, Interdigital, NI, Qualcomm, Radisys, and Xilinx – all part of the larger PAWR Industry Consortium. Federal funding for OAX activities is provided by NSF and the U.S. Department of Defense's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering [DOD OUSD (R&E)] through awards under the PAWR program. OAX is located at the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern University in Boston.

"The launch of OAX puts muscle not only behind U.S. efforts to expand the capabilities and performance of 5G networks, but also behind the technologies that will move the wireless industry beyond 5G," said PAWR Technical Program Director Abhimanyu (Manu) Gosain. "By hosting OAX as part of the PAWR program, we are also ensuring there is a clear path from software development through to testing and prototyping of new software, hardware, and wireless applications."

"A lot of thinking and hard work from the board as well as the engineering teams of EURECOM and the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA) has gone into laying the ground work for the launch of the OpenAirX-Labs," said Raymond Knopp, President of the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance and Professor at EURECOM. "The Alliance from its onset has remained fully committed to creating the conditions for openness and thus to the worldwide adoption of OAI. This has involved the laser focus of developers from EURECOM, OSA and the key partners in the community to deliver end-to-end 5G core and RAN stacks that are complete, stable, easy to deploy, and appealing for the use cases of our contributors and users. We see great opportunities ahead as OAI now expands through its U.S. home, the OAX labs in North America."

https://advancedwireless.org/

https://openairinterface.org/

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NSF launches Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation Systems program

The U.S. National Science Foundation unveiled a new Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation Systems (RINGS) program to accelerate research in areas that will potentially have significant impact on emerging Next Generation (NextG) wireless and mobile communication, networking, sensing, and computing systems, along with global-scale services. The focus is on greatly improving the resiliency of such networked systems among other performance metrics

Central to NextG systems is resiliency to survive, gracefully adapt to, and rapidly recover from malicious attacks, component failures, and natural and human-induced disruptions. Therefore, the RINGS program will seek to advance the underlying technologies to guarantee worldwide availability, security and reliability of NextG systems.

The RINGS program will be a collaboration between the federal government and private industry, including:

Department of Defense Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering

National Institute of Standards and Technology

• Apple
• Ericsson
• Google
• IBM
• Intel
• Microsoft
• Nokia
• Qualcomm Technologies
• VMware.

https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/announcements/042721.jsp

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Pacific Wave Activates 100G Link to Asia

Pacific Wave activated the first 100G research and education (R&E) network link between Asia and the U.S., with related transit, peering, and exchange fabric.

Pacific Wave will provide this 100Gbps capability to the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded International Research Network Connections (IRNC) TransPAC4 project, led by Indiana University.

This integrated 100Gbps trans-pacific layer 1, 2 and 3 TransPAC – Pacific Wave network fabric incorporates:

• A dedicated 100Gbps wavelength between the Pacific Wave national Research & Education (R&E) node in Seattle, U.S.A. and Tokyo, Japan
• 100Gbps peering and routing fabrics – using Brocade MLX routers - in Tokyo and Seattle
• Access and peering in Tokyo for Asian R&E networks at both the long-standing WIDE/T-REX/T-LEX Open Exchange Point, and at the newly-established Pacific Wave node at 3-8-21 Higashi-Shinagawa, Shinagawa-Ku.
• The 100Gbps connection in the U.S. using Pacific Wave’s existing 100Gbps open, distributed, wide-area peering and exchange fabric, which is based on a distributed mesh of Brocade MLX routers, across the Pacific Wave backbone, and has primary points of presence in Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Los Angeles, as well as additional 100Gbps access and peering at StarLight in Chicago
• On the U.S. side, the Pacific Wave fabric provides direct 100Gbps connectivity with multiple 100Gbps interfaces to Internet2’s Advanced Layer 2 and 3 Services (AL3S and AL2S), as well as 100Gbps connectivity to ESnet, and 100Gbps and/or 10Gbps connections to nearly all the major Asia Pacific R&E networks, U.S. Department of Energy’s ESnet, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration N-wave, and commercial cloud providers regularly used by national and international R&E communities.
• Interconnection of the U.S.-based Pacific Wave and the Japan-based WIDE/T-REX peering, exchange, interconnection and Science-DMZ facilities, creating the first intercontinental R&E open, distributed exchange and peering fabric
• Extension of the new Pacific Wave experimental SDN and SDX fabrics across the Pacific Ocean to Asia, enabling direct interconnection with Asian R&E SDN and SDX projects, including those supported by WIDE and others. GENI, OpenFlow, and related projects will also be supported
• Connectivity to Pacific Wave’s 100Gbps wide-area Inter-institutional Science DMZ network, which has primary points of presence within Los Angeles, Seattle, Sunnyvale, and which serves as the backplane for the new NSF-sponsored Pacific Research Platform

http://www.pacificwave.net

California's CENIC Wins Grant to Expand Pacific Wave Research Net

Thursday, September 24, 2015  CENIC, Internet Exchange, Pacific Wave  No comments

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), along with the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), was awarded a grant of nearly $3.5 million from the National Science Foundation’s International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program to expand the Pacific Wave Software Defined Exchange (SDX) over a five-year period.

The grant enables the expansion of U.S.-Asia scientific research network collaboration.

The Pacific Wave SDX, which will be deployed in Seattle, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, is an integral component of the international effort to interconnect research and education networks using Software Defined Networking (SDN). The Pacific Wave SDX joins several other IRNC awardees to support research, development and experimental deployment of multi-domain SDXs and will serve as an innovation platform for next generation networking, including enhancing connectivity to campus and wide-area “Science DMZ” infrastructures like the Pacific Research Platform (PRP), which enables researchers to move data between labs and scientific instruments to collaborators’ sites, supercomputer centers, and data-repositories without performance degradation.

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NSF Funds Smart City Projects across U.S.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced nearly $40 million in grants to support Smart City projects around the U.S.

"NSF's investments are helping to cultivate increasingly smart and connected communities for the future," said NSF Director France Córdova. "The effective integration of networked computing systems, physical devices, data sources, and infrastructure, all with humans in the loop, is improving the quality of life for people all across the nation."

The funding commitment includes:

• Approximately $12 million for new projects funded through US Ignite to support research leading to prototype applications that leverage gigabit and advanced networking connectivity and impact multiple national priority areas, including healthcare, energy, transportation, manufacturing, education and learning, and public safety. The awards will also build "living labs" that provide the support needed to scale up these prototype applications across cities and regions, leading toward an ecosystem of smart and connected communities.
• Approximately $10 million in new Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) research projects with a focus on Smart and Connected Communities and the Internet of Things.
• More than $3 million to support the creation of a new instrument--the Array of Things--in Chicago that will be the first research infrastructure to allow researchers to rapidly deploy sensors, embedded systems, computing and communications systems at scale in an urban environment.
• Nearly $2.5 million to enhance the design and operation of efficient, secure and Critical, Resilient, Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) that provide essential goods and services in the context of cities and communities.
• $2.5 million to enable NSF-funded researchers to participate in the National Institute of Standards and Technology Global Cities Team Challenge.
• Approximately $2 million in new Smart and Connected Health research projects to accelerate the development of next-generation health care solutions to enable patient-centered care and wellness that extend to the home, workplace, and community.
• $375,000 to establish a Research Coordination Network to stimulate novel international research on how to integrate data from physical sensors, social media and other sources.
• Nearly $4 million to support academic and industry partnerships through the Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity program that facilitate integration of breakthrough research discoveries into human-centered service systems.

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=136253&org=NSF&from=news

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Ciena Joins NSF's GENI Project

Ciena has joined the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project that supports "at scale" research in networking, distributed systems, cloud services, security, and novel applications.

GENI provides access to hundreds of widely distributed resources, including virtual machines and “bare-machines.”  The company said that by connecting GENI’s multi-site cloud computing resources with its testbed, its researchers’ gain greater ability to collaborate with external researchers via a multi-directional interconnected system to test new applications on a large scale network and give assurance of their real-world viability. For example, this can be used to test new network function virtualization (NFV) applications like virtual WAN optimization or network security.

“Ciena’s collaboration with the National Science Foundation’s GENI project will help drive continued exploration of advanced network enabled applications and support the creation of more programmable, agile networks that are essential in today’s web-scale world,” stated Rod Wilson, Senior Director of External Research, Ciena.

http://www.ciena.com/about/newsroom/press-releases/Ciena-Joins-National-Science-Foundations-GENI-Project.html

http://www.geni.net/

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