The wireless applications are not only growing so fast at an unprecedented speed, which crosses a wide variety of sectors, including electric power systems (e.g.,mobile SCADA), eliminating manual data collection (e.g., retails and mobile marketing), and capturing/transferring live videos (in social networks), and much more that are exacerbated by IoT deployments and smartphones. Our expectations are: (1) How to design medium access control protocols on top of coexisting wireless standards? The answer is to design an innovative MAC control plane that is able to ����������������centralized��������������� take a panoramic view of the MAC solutions; (2) How to detect and identify unoccupied spectrum slices and further to make a multi-level decision? The answer is to develop large-scale online spectrum sensing and monitoring algorithms such that spectrum occupancy and opportunities will be manifiested to the MAC control plane that beyonds the standards sensing and spectrum management methods today ; (3) How to achieve low-energy sensing and low-hardware cost for devices operate in the passive/active bands in a wide-range of spectrum bands that beyond existing 6GHz thresholds SDR technologies? The answer is to design transmitter and receivers with new solutions for device control, hardware infrastructure, spectrum sensing for real-time waveform detection and spectrum sensing. (4) How to ensure that the unoccuipied spectrum will be effective utilized while other uses are being protected through radio frequency interference (RFI) and avoidance? The answer is to design a new MAC control protocol that can be implemented over coexisting systems such that a holistic view of the spectrum utilization can be evaluated.

Through multidisciplinary doctoral education in Cybersecurity for Electric Power Systems (CEPSE), North Carolina State University (NCSU) will increase its commitment to graduate training in two areas designated by the GAANN Program as critical to national need: Cybersecurity and Electrical Engineering. The goal of is to enlarge the pool of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who will pursue teaching and research careers in cybersecurity for electric power systems, thereby promoting workforce development and technological innovation impacting, national security, energy security, and environmental sustainability.

The practice and experience in more than a decade have demonstrated that spectrum sharing is difficult: opportunistic spectrum access by secondary systems has a major technical hurdle it is difficult to accurately sense the spectrum band status and detect a new primary signal while the secondary communication is ongoing. At the same time, it is factual that we have many existing and upcoming wireless access technologies, which have an acute demand for spectrum sharing and better utilization than today. We believe that the current difficulty to realize the full potential of radio spectrum is due to the binding of a wireless service to a specific radio spectrum. In other words, most of the prior studies focused on algorithms and protocols to improve spectrum efficiency, but paid less attentions to how these solutions will eventually benefit the users. With today's huge number of wireless devices and ever-increasing new wireless services, we need a new paradigm to separate wireless services from radio spectrum, so that the radio spectrum is abstracted and mapped to a wireless service only when it is needed, rather than a static binding for years. Therefore, we propose to study a Multi-Layer wireless networks in the sense that each access technology being a radio layer, and each wireless device being able to user multiple wireless interfaces for opportunistic access. Our objective is to build a theoretical framework that stemming from detecting and identifying radio spectrum in a geographical region, to selecting an optimal access band or channel from an individual device's perspective, and further to achieve rendezvous with common channels for pair-wise communications, and eventually building device-to-device communications via single-hop and multi-hop networking architecture.

Vehicle networks have been playing an increasing role in driving safety, network economy, and people's daily life. While vehicle networks have received tremendous attentions, the existing research is primarily focusing on the performance study of vehicular networks by taking three assumptions: there exists a vehicle network through vehicle-to-vehicle and/or vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, there exists a finite path in the network between any two vehicles, and there exist attainable wireless channels for communications. In view of upcoming boom of mobile applications over vehicular networks in practice and wide-range deployment of autonomous driving vehicles in the near future, the validity of these assumptions is questionable. In this project, we propose to address four interrelated but equally important issues towards building blocks of a theoretical foundation, so called ontology of inter-vehicle networking, which are the composition of inter-vehicle networks, discovery of neighboring vehicles through spectrum cognition, coverage of messages in finite and large-scale networks, and robustness properties of inter-vehicle networks. The objective is to investigate fundamental understanding and challenges of inter-vehicle networking, including theoretical foundation and constraints in practice that enable such networks to achieve performance limits.

This proposal is to request travel funding for students at U.S. institutions to attend the 27th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, Chicago, Illinois, USA, October 7-10, 2019.

This project aims to develop building blocks towards a theoretical foundation of rapid mitigation of potentially catastrophic disturbances and control of inter-dependent dynamic networks. The nature of the failures and disturbances includes deliberate adversarial cyber attacks on the infrastructures that are highly inter-dependent, such as tactical ad hoc networks, future power grids, and social networks. Our aim is to ensure large-scale network resilience against cascading failures so as to safeguard physical infrastructures such as the national power grid, transportation grid, and beyond these, the global information grid and defense strategic communication systems. The issues that are deemed fundamental are i) modeling approaches of inter-dependent networks in order to characterize the cascading effects among these networks, such as cascade failure evolution and to identify critical points and correlated events to guard against, ii) vulnerability analysis of cascading failures with respect to network topology, such as network partitions and blackholes, as well as capture the impacts of failures in the spatial-temporal domain, with uantitative and measurable limits and boundary properties; iii) epidemic propagation of failures due to cyber attacks with and without countermeasure in mobile networks in that the increasing reliance on wireless communications, while offering great benefits of communications in highly dynamic environments, surrenders our information delivery to both active and passive malware attacks. The potential benefits are very promising: preemptive countermeasures can be designed by observing abnormal events, efficient design and planning of networking architectures and protocols for optimal system operation, and more importantly, rapid responses to failures by making the best use of islanding strategies to halt the cascade in progress, and, with minimal cost, damage and casualties, so as to achieve information assurance.

In this project, we plan to explore fundamental issues that advance our understanding of using mobile clouds in deliverying wireless data traffic. In other words, we aim to find out whether and under what conditions mobile clouds are feasible for providing mobile application services or not and whether there exist theoretical limits or guidelines that can help or hinder the development of mobile clouds. An in-depth understanding of such questions would greatly help emerging new applications over mobile platform. Therefore, we propose to focus on four inter-correlated, equally important issues toward building blocks of a theoretical foundation for mobile cloud computing, that is, evolution of single-hop mobile cloudlet, performance of opportunistic mobile cloudlet, efficient discovery of neighboring cloudlets and spatial-temporal properties of mobile-to-cloud. In particular, we consider the data transportation over the wireless sector in which our main objective is to have a close-up of formation and evolution of mobile cloudlet over time, with possible intermediate relays, and ends up with base stations or access points.

N2Women, founded by Tracy Camp and Wendi Heinzelman in 2006, is a discipline-specific community for researchers in the communications and networking research fields. The main goal of N2 Women is to foster connections among the underrepresented women in computer networking and related research fields. Women are underrepresented in this field, and networking provides the structure to mentor and encourage the younger members of the community (e.g., graduate students and junior faculty) in their career pursuits, helping them to achieve their full potential and benefitting the networking research community in particular and the computer science community overall. N2Women currently has over 1,000 members. It organizes 60-90 minute meetings at networking and communications conferences and full-day workshop events. To date, there have been over 118 meetings and 5 workshops. In 2017, N2Women will transition to a yearly rather than biennial workshop and will also open the workshop to a percentage of men. Much of the professional development content of past workshops is broadly applicable to both male and female students and junior researchers. With generous support from SIGCOMM, IEEE ComSoc (IEEE INFOCOM and ICCCN), and other pending sponsors, N2Women will expand the workshop so that the community as a whole may benefit from this type of professional development event on a regular basis.

Wireless networks have evolved into a new era, which is going beyond the traditional spectrum that are either licensed and unlicensed. Motivated by the FCC investigation as well as the huge demand for high speed wireless data networks, software defined radio networks that take the advantage of opportunistic spectrum sensing and utilization, have opened the doorway to tactical communications in military communications and many others. Therefore, this project aims to build a small prototype of software defined radio networks, which is composed of three subnets to measure the effects of spectrum congestion, in particular, the cascading failures due to jamming and spectrum interference.

Vehicle ad hoc Network (VANET) is one of the most promising applications of mobile ad hoc net- works (MANETs), which has emerged as a radically new paradigm for the design of networking protocols and mobility models; understanding of the impact of fast-varying radio channels and geographycally-constrained regions; and design of a variety of applications so called intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Our goal in this project is to identify the fundamental limitations of information dissemination in high speed vehicular networks and the cause of discrepancy in the current understanding of per-node capacity, and to develop a set of simple, yet effective algorithms and protocols motivated by our findings. Our approach is to take a user-perspective and examine the impact of high speed vehicles on network topology (not fully connected), time-varying multiple access interference (MAI), relay selection and to directly exploit to the benefit of judicious choice of routing metrics.