Task 1.3: Networks of Services

[Kubiatowitz, Lee, Rabaey]

This task exposes TerraSwarm capabilities as services, enabling applications to be built by composing these services. Capabilities that could be so exposed include networking, controller synthesis algorithms, sophisticated simulators, machine learning algorithms, databases of public information, etc. One of the key steps is to understand how the characteristics of these swarm services differ from the traditional ones and then show how new system architectures should be designed to effectively address the challenges. For networking, for example, what makes this challenging (especially in the wireless world) is the need for network resource discovery (which may include interference measurement), the creation of scheduling mechanisms so that contract-terms are met, and the development of resource brokerage across networks that may be owned by different administrative domains. Applications that treat networking as a service can then use innovative wireless deployment strategies that combine opportunistic (peer-to-peer) and infrastructure based networking, and support a range of economic trade-off schemes. In all cases, resource discovery, access control (to hardware or information), and contract negotiation mechanisms will be required, in addition to resource management mechanisms and task allocation strategies across scale.