Planning: AI Ready: STAIRWAI to COSMOS: Sensor-enabled Testbed for Advancing Innovative Research in Wireless+AI

About This Grant

Wireless network management can benefit from Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based approaches (“AI for Wireless”) and AI applications could be optimized for operating over wireless networks (“Wireless for AI”). This project will demonstrate the design of an experimental testbed for research and evaluation that can benefit both “AI for Wireless” and “Wireless for AI.” The goal is to support an ecosystem built around an integrated wireless and AI infrastructure that can be used by the research community to develop and evaluate novel solutions for problems in advanced manufacturing, smart cities, transportation, and beyond. A key objective is to lower the barrier to entry for AI researchers to use wireless networks and wireless researchers to use AI models by developing onboarding and tutorial materials for new researchers. The resulting proof-of-concept will validate the design principles for a larger-scale testbed. The project will develop a framework for adding AI capabilities to a city-scale programmable wireless testbed. These enhancements will provide researchers with easier access to the wireless infrastructure and AI tools designed for working with wireless data and operating over wireless networks. Specific activities include (a) workshops with academic and industry researchers to share the state-of-the-art and desired future directions that could be supported by the proposed testbed, (b) identifying what existing data sets can be generated from the testbed and demonstrations of how to use AI algorithms on them, along with tutorial and onboarding material for community researchers, and (c) an outreach plan to engage a broader set of stakeholders for developing and using the final testbed. The result will be a prioritized list of functionalities for an AI-enabled testbed, specific tasks to build those functionalities, and target application domains and use cases. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.