U.S.-Ireland R&D Partnership: NeTS: Small: Fungibility in Mobile Networks for Resilient 6G

Mobile networks are a critical infrastructure of national interest, providing communication services essential for supporting our society’s economy, public health, safety, and security. However, resilience became a crucial requirement of the mobile network design only with recent 6G pre-standardization activities. This project aims to enable natively resilient 6G by leveraging the equivalence across different network resources, components, and functions to afford a new degree of freedom to withstand and recover from attacks and failures. One of the significant challenges addressed by this project is the creation of metrics and methods to quantify resilience in the context of mobile networks, informing the development of novel studies and algorithmic approaches to resource management in the presence of wireless security threats, e.g., jamming or eavesdropping, or unintentional failures related to equipment malfunction or congestion. The proposed research program strengthens the technological and research cooperation between the U.S., the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland, while providing educational opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from international collaboration and working on a geographically distributed team. The research findings and developed knowledge will stimulate joint dissemination and engagement with relevant international stakeholders that define the roadmap for developing and adopting 6G systems. This project is a collaborative effort part of the US-Ireland R&D Partnership, enabling natively resilient 6G networks by leveraging the equivalence between different network resources, components, or functions, referred to as fungibility. By adopting concepts from risk theory, complex networks, and computational biology, this project quantifies the capacity of wireless networks to withstand and recover from disruptions while maintaining service continuity. This project proposes new metrics to understand the fungibility of network resources for creating redundancies and proposes innovative resource management strategies and optimization algorithms. The technical work is divided into four research thrusts. Characterizing the resilience of mobile network deployments, exploring fungibility between spectral and spatial resources and deployment options under attack scenarios. Quantifying the impact of novel attacks against different Radio Access Technologies (RATs), and develop new methods that utilize equivalencies between different RATs to remain operational. Proposing new definitions of robustness and degeneracy from computational biology, describing functionally equivalent topologies, and investigating how both concepts benefit radio resource management and topology control in mobile networks. Finally, examining the fungibility between disaggregated Radio Access Network (RAN) functions and functional splits, and proposing orchestration strategies resilient to compromised mobile network infrastructure due to attacks or failures. 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.