ECE Faculty Study Pervasive Edge Computing

Receive NSF Grant to Develop Architecture for Next Generation Sensing Applications

ECE Faculty Yuanyuan Yang and Fan Ye have won a NSF grant totaling $745K for three years to develop a novel data-centric “Pervasive Edge Computing” architecture that will revolutionize next generation sensing applications. Modern mobile devices such as smartphones embedded with various sensors have enabled a plethora of applications for transportation, fitness/health, and environment. Current applications adopt a centralized design that relies on a cloud backend to collect, process and disseminate sensing information. This dependency on backend has major limitations: it takes significant overhead to set up and maintain a backend; the connectivity to backend may be costly or unavailable; sharing time-sensitive or high volume data can be difficult due to latency or bandwidth constraints.

The project seeks to create a new architecture that promotes sensing data to first class citizens whose existence is independent of any particular devices. Thus data become self-sustainable and can be hosted by any willing devices. Peer mobile devices can discover what data exist in its surrounding environment, retrieve desired data, process them to extract and further propagate valuable information. This data centric architecture is expected to completely eliminate the dependency on backend and consequent vulnerabilities of current sensing applications, and enable spontaneous data sharing and processing for the next generation of sensing applications.

Assistant Professor Fan Ye joined Stony Brook in the Fall of 2014. An example of his research interests is presented here.