US Ignite: Track 2: Sustainable Ecosystem of Smart Applications

Us Ignite, Inc., Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

The economic and competitive value of widely available advanced networking has become well known, with availabity of next generation networking impacting factors as basic as homeowner property values and housing rents. However, deployment of next generation networking in U.S. cities and regions has lagged that of a number of other nations. This project assembles and jump-starts a growing and sustainable ecosystem of smart gigabit city testbeds which support applications delivering important new advances in healthcare, education, public safety, and other national priority areas. These advanced ecosystems leverage advanced Internet concepts developed by prior NSF research programs that are not yet available on today's commercial Internet. By leveraging existing multi-gigabit links to interconnect the cities, and by providing city-based interoperable application infrastructure the project allows entrepreneurs and academics in one city to write and trial visually-compelling and ultra-responsive new Internet applications that can be replicated into other cities and regions. An important key will be the involvement of citizens and community organizations in building and experimenting with advanced networking applications addressing national priorities. The project will: 1) Mobilize and interconnect 12 to 15 cities and regions as smart gigabit city testbeds and connect to a small number of other volunteers from the U.S. UCAN community anchor community; 2) leverage GENI technology and deploy a new community-focused computing infrastructure; support the develop and adapt national priority and smart city applications that uniquely leverage this infrastructure and can be replicated in the other cities and regions; 4) Identify novel unsolved problems that can help define areas for future Internet research and 5) share information among ecosystem participants. To maximize the network effects, the project will utilize interoperable advanced wired and wireless applications platforms, interoperable federation, authentication and authorization, and built-in security measures and measurement/logging. This project builds the initial infrastructure upon the distributed infrastructure pioneered and deployed by the GENI and prior US Ignite projects in the academic or civic networking infrastructures of 56 cities in the United States.