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The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) awarded nearly $5.5 million in the first round of grants from the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund.

The $1.5 billion Wireless Innovation Fund supports the development of open and interoperable wireless networks as part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Investing in America agenda.

Open and interoperable wireless equipment will help drive competition, strengthen global supply chain resiliency and lower costs for consumers and network operators.

“America’s continued leadership in wireless technology is critical to our economic competitiveness and national security,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said. “These investments in the next generation of wireless innovation will help create a more diverse and resilient marketplace and ensure that American companies and entrepreneurs, along with our allies, remain at the cutting edge of this crucial technology.”

The shift to open and interoperable networks is vital for our national and economic security. The development of new, open-architecture approaches to wireless networks will help to ensure that future wireless equipment is built by the U.S. and its global allies and partners – not vendors from nations that threaten our national security.

This first round of funding will support R&D and testing activities related to evaluating energy efficiency, measuring performance of interoperable equipment and testing methods for sharing spectrum.

The funding totaled $5,482,052 and was awarded to projects at Northeastern University, New York University, and DeepSig Inc.

Innovation Fund Director Amanda Toman announced the awards at an event with Northeastern University.

“This first round of Wireless Innovation Fund awards will accelerate the transition to more open and resilient 5G and 6G wireless networks,” said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson. “These grants will fund important research and testing to catalyze greater adoption of open wireless equipment. This in turn will promote resilience, innovation, and efficiency in the mobile networks so important to our economy.”

“At Northeastern, our research enterprise is relentlessly focused on impact in the world,” said David Madigan, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Northeastern University. “This grant from the NTIA, made possible by the signing of the historic CHIPs Act, will be help us continue to pioneer critical research in wireless systems and networks, ensuring that the next generation of the Internet of Things will be a continuum of connected devices able to interact in new and exciting ways.”

“This project seeks to develop testing and evaluation procedures for next-generation cellular wireless systems in the upper mid-band, a promising new frequency range that has attracted considerable interest from wireless carriers,” said Sundeep Rangan, Associate Director of NYU WIRELESS. “Systems in these frequencies will likely need to be adaptive and agile to utilize the wide bandwidth and directionally communicate. The project will investigate how this spectrum agility can be tested for both dynamic spectrum sharing and resiliency to attacks— two vital features of these bands.”

“DeepSig is honored to be a recipient of the NTIA’s Public Wireless Innovation Fund,” said Jim Shea, CEO of DeepSig Inc. “Our effort will improve the performance and competitiveness of the Open RAN Air-Interface by leveraging DeepSig’s Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and tools for modeling and measuring the wireless environment under real world conditions. Developing new Generative AI tools for Open RAN will accelerate the adoption and performance of Open RAN for 5G, and future AI-Native 5G Advanced and 6G. We are excited to get to work!”

Funded by the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, the Innovation Fund will invest $1.5 billion over the next decade to support the development of open and interoperable networks. NTIA will make up to $140.5 million in grants available on a rolling basis from the first round of funding.

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The data rates of both wired and wireline links have increased relentlessly over the last several decades. Wireless access rates used to trail those for wireline access rates, but of late have started catching up, so much so that they can  be viewed as essentially equal. For most applications,  including mobile applications, bandwidth availability is not viewed as a serious constraint anymore. 5G is delivering tens of megabits per second to users, and will soon provide more. The next driver of advances in networking is expected to be the need for reliable low latency connectivity, rather than bandwidth alone. These applications include XR (Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality), wirelessly controlled robots and haptic communications. The latency requirements for such applications vary from tens of milliseconds down to the sub-millisecond range. While the latency requirements for these applications can be met by carefully engineered wired and wireless communications, typically in controlled indoor environments, it is still a challenge to provide them over cellular networks. This talk will focus on the emerging challenge of providing reliable low latency broadband communications over cellular networks.

Source: https://hpsr2023.ieee-hpsr.org/program/keynotes/

The 24th IEEE International Conference on High-Performance Switching and Routing (IEEE HPSR 2023) held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, from June 5 to 7 culminated with the prestigious Best Paper Award bestowed upon the work titled “Do Switches Still Need to Deliver Packets in Sequence?” authored by Ufuk Usubutun, Fraida Fund, and Shivendra Panwar from New York University & Tandon School of Engineering.

Internet switches become harder and costlier to build for higher line rates and switch capacities. In-sequence delivery of packets has traditionally been a constraint on switch designs because TCP loss detection was considered vulnerable to out-of-sequence arrivals. For this reason, extremely efficient and simple designs, such as the Load Balanced Birkhoff-von Neumann Switch, were considered impractical. The research reevaluates this constraint considering modern TCP implementations with loss detection algorithms like Recent Acknowledgment (RACK) that are more resilient to out-of-order arrivals. In a set of testbed experiments representative of wide area core networks, the research evaluates the performance of TCP flows traversing a load balanced switch that reorders some packets within a flow. The findings indicate that widely deployed and standard TCP implementations of the last decade achieve similar performance when traversing a load balanced switch as they do when there is no reordering. Furthermore, it also verifies that an increase in the line rate leads to favorable conditions for time based loss detection methods, such as the one used in RACK. If further validated, these results suggest that switch designs that were previously thought to be unsuitable can potentially be utilized, thanks to the relaxation of the in-sequence delivery constraint.

Source: https://hpsr2023.ieee-hpsr.org/

Paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10147992

Lightning-fast, low-latency wireless, from 5G to 6G and beyond, will enable such services as virtual and augmented reality streaming, near-zero latency vehicle-to-cloud communications to help self-driving cars navigate in real time, remote surgery, coordination of automated systems in factories and other facilities, and a plethora of futuristic consumer apps. But it will also open a Pandora’s box of security vulnerabilities in the hardware serving as its backbone and software driving its networks.

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative has awarded three teams of researchers at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering a combined $2.5 million to confront these challenges head on. Participating in the projects, which are supported by NSF’s Resilient and Intelligent Next Generation Systems (RINGS) partnership, are Elza Erkip, Siddharth Garg, Zhong-Ping Jiang, Farshad Khorrami, Ramesh Karri, Yong Liu, Pei Liu, Shiv Panwar, and Sundeep Rangan. All are professors of electrical and computer engineering, with affiliations at NYU WIRELESS, NYU Center for Cybersecurity, and the Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT).

Together, the projects will focus on making current and future wireless infrastructure, software and hardware systems more resilient to flaws, accidents, subterfuge and hacks. Of the RINGS partnership grants awarded to 37 institutions, NYU Tandon was one of only three to receive a trio of them.

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Each year, Intel recognizes a small group of university researchers whose work advances modern computing and exhibits fundamental insights, industry relevance, and technical complexity. The company recently announced its 2022 honorees, and topping the list was Ramesh Karri, an NYU Tandon Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-founder and co-chair of NYU’s Center for Cybersecurity.

Karri is known for his seminal work in ensuring that the global hardware supply chain is as secure as possible – an especially great concern in an age when chips are being manufactured at supplier foundries far from where they are designed, giving bad actors ample opportunity to install malicious “Trojan horse” circuits or to pirate intellectual property. Vulnerabilities in the chain threaten not only personal computers and smartphones but automotive systems, major utilities, the aerospace industry, nuclear facilities, and industrial equipment.

Intel cited a project in which Karri and his team focused on boosting system-on-a-chip survivability. “In the world of software, if a vulnerability is discovered, it’s easy to provide a patch,” Karri explains. “It’s different with hardware; you must detect any vulnerability before the chip is actually fabricated.” To mitigate that situation, Karri is building innovative “Patching Blocks” architecture, which leverages field-programmable gate arrays to address in-field device survivability by monitoring security bugs and performing corrective actions. He and his colleagues also proposed a systemic approach that guides designers in maximizing “patchability.”

Karri’s Intel “Outstanding Researcher” honor is just the latest in a long list of accomplishments: a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), he is widely acknowledged for bringing the need for strong hardware security to the attention of the industry. In 2002 he and his colleagues generated the first research on attack-resilient chip architecture, demonstrating before anyone else that integrated circuits’ test and debug ports could be used by hackers. Since then, he pioneered the technique of  microchip camouflaging, a tactic to prevent reverse engineering; delivered the first set of invited IEEE tutorials in hardware security in the U.S.,  Europe, and Latin America; presented the first research paper on split manufacturing, a means of thwarting counterfeiting by an untrusted foundry by dividing a chip’s blueprint into several components and distributing each to a different fabricator; explored the vulnerabilities in digital microfluidic biochips, which are used by researchers and medical professionals for diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and environmental monitoring; and more.

Jason Fung, Intel’s Director of Offensive Security Research & Academic Research Engagement also praised Karri for his ongoing commitment in advising and mentoring security researchers within both academia and industry. Some of his most influential work with aspiring cyber professionals comes during the annual Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) games at Tandon, now the most comprehensive set of cyber challenges for students around the globe. Among the most hotly anticipated parts of the event is the Embedded Security Challenge, which Karri founded in 2008. The oldest hardware security competition in the world, the Challenge requires contestants to exploit the weaknesses of a target system, assess the effectiveness of their hardware security techniques, identify vulnerabilities, and implement effective defense mechanisms.

Research developed during the contest has propelled the entire field of hardware trust, and several students who have participated have gone on to make important contributions to the field. (The challenge was foundational in the establishment of a National Science Foundation-supported network called Trust-Hub, an open and collaborative digital clearinghouse and community-building site where researchers exchange papers, hardware platforms, source codes, and tools.)

“I congratulate Professor Karri on his well-deserved Intel recognition,” said Dean Jelena Kovačević. “This latest honor highlights the importance of his research, which has cemented NYU Tandon as a world leader in the vital realm of hardware security.”

Source: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/nyu-tandon-professor-named-one-intels-outstanding-researchers-year