CHRONOS

A Cloud based Hybrid RF-Optical Network Over Synchronous Links

Synopsis

CHRONOS flow chart
Alternative Text for CHRONOS block diagram

A green block in the center called “Hybrid Cloud (FPGA+GPU+CPU)” with Five double sided arrows connecting 4 separate “Edge Nodes” and to the Internet. Also scattered yellow pentagon shapes denoting mobile wireless terminals. On the top-right corner, it mentioned the PIs, the department’s name and the name of the College.
 

In 2018, Associate Professors (Assistant Professors at the time) in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dr. Dola Saha, Dr. Aveek Dutta, and Dr. Hany Elgala, were awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) CISE Research Infrastructure grant of $765,999 to support their project titled,  “CHRONOS: Cloud based Hybrid RF-Optical Network Over Synchronous links”. The project was to develop a large wireless testbed that expands the capabilities of current Cloud Radio Access Networks (C-RAN). The primary goal of CHRONOS is to design, build and maintain a multi-node, heterogeneous, wideband, scalable and synchronous C-RAN that will enable emerging applications like Virtual Reality (VR), Industrial Internet of Things (I-IoT), 3D broadcast video, telesurgery, etc.

The combination of tight synchrony and heterogeneity among the network constituents make CHRONOS radically different and foundational to investigate previously unexplored research problems in wireless networking and communication. The key architectural advantage of CHRONOS is the decoupling of baseband signal processing from the front-end allowing for complex, joint processing of signals from spatially distributed radio units. It also optimizes real-time performance by having computation capabilities at the network edge while trading off energy consumption. The flexible architecture of CHRONOS implements DSP kernels by pooling FPGA, CPU and GPU resources for scalable and on-demand provisioning.

This infrastructure cuts across multiple domains including wireless networks, digital communication, signal processing, optical communication, hardware and software architecture and parallel processing. The ability to synchronize distant radio unit to simultaneously communicate in RF and Optical frequencies alleviates the inefficiencies imposed by co-located antennas in existing communication methods. Innovation in distributed antenna geometry will enable spatially efficient applications that can only be sustained by carefully designed architecture of CHRONOS. It also advances the research in virtual cloud platforms that support partial reconfiguration of FPGA to scale the DSP tasks based on demand. These efforts in multiple fundamental domains are not isolated, but are tightly coupled and require close interaction to realize the full potential of this infrastructure.

The figure below shows the implemented architecture with BittWare TeraBox as the Hybrid Baseband Processor, Xilinx RFSoCs as the edge nodes with custom RF and Optical frontends. The mobile terminals are a variety of software defined radios with different capabilities. 
 

Hardware implementation of the CHRONOS architecture
Hardware implementation of the CHRONOS architecture

Yellow box on the right shows the FPGA server called Bittware Terabox. That is connected over Fiber optic cable supporting the eCPRI protocol to the multiple Heterogeneous Edge Nodes. These edge nodes communicate wirelessly to the Mobile nodes shown as multiple purple boxes. 
At the bottom row there are FOUR hardware units: from left to right, 1) FPGA Server, 2) Xilinx RFSoC, 3) Custom RF+ Optical front-end, 4) USRPs
 

Sponsors

This project is funded by National Science Foundation (NSF), Award number : 1823225, titled "CRI: II-NEW: CHRONOS : A Cloud based Hybrid RF-Optical Network Over Synchronous Links".
The College of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering and the University at Albany has generously provided the 3-phase power outlet extension to our Cloud Server, Gigabit Ethernet, wire racks mounted around the department to place the Heterogeneous Network Edge Nodes and space for the testbed setup.

 

College of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering University at Albany State University of New York
NSF

Personnel & Collaborators

Principal Investigator
Dola Saha
Dola Saha
Associate Professor
College of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering; Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
co-Principal Investigators
Aveek Dutta
Aveek Dutta
Associate Professor
College of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering; Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Hany Elgala
Hany Elgala
Associate Professor
College of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering; Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering


PhD Students

Hesham Mohammed

Hesham Mohammed
ECE, CEAS, UAlbany

Tayyebeh Asgari Gashteroodkhani

Tayyebeh Asgari Gashteroodkhani
ECE, CEAS, UAlbany

Zunayeed-Bin Zahir

Zunayeed-Bin Zahir
ECE, CEAS, UAlbany

Maqsood Careem

Maqsood Careem
ECE, CEAS, UAlbany

Monette Khadr

Monette Khadr
ECE, CEAS, UAlbany

Ahmed Hussein

Ahmed Hussein
ECE, CEAS, UAlbany

Iresha Amarasekara


Iresha Amarasekara (2023)
ECE, CEAS, UAlbany

 
 

 

MS Student

Skanda Balasubramanian
 

Undergraduates

Kristjan Bruno (2023)
Abdullah Qureshi (2021)
Joshua Cho (2020)
Shaleen Alfred (2019)
Ryan Abuasi (2019)
Travis Cooper (2019)
Nimra Faheem (2019)
 

Collaborators

RF Diagnostics: We are collaborating with RF Diagnostics to design custom frontend for Optical and RF transceivers.

Avid Tech, Avnet: We have collaborated with Avid to create custom packets over CPRI protocol to tune the design and frontend parameters on the fly.

Publications

  1. Hesham Mohammed, Xue Wei and Dola Saha, "Adversarial Learning for Hiding Wireless Signals", in IEEE Globecom 2021
  2. Hesham Mohammed and Dola Saha, "Adversarial Learning for Cross Layer Security", in 3rd ACM Workshop on Wireless Security and Machine Learning, (WiSeML 2021)
  3. Ahmed Hussein, Dola Saha, and Hany Elgala, "Mixed-Carrier Communication for Technology Division Multiplexing", Electronics , v.10 , 2021
  4. Hesham Mohammed and Dola Saha, "Learning Secured Modulation With Deep Adversarial Neural Networks", 2020 IEEE 92nd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2020-Fall)
  5. Hesham Mohammed and Dola Saha "Rand-OFDM: A Secured Wireless Signal", 2020 International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworkS (COMSNETS 2020)
  6. Shuvam Chakraborty, Hesham Mohammed and Dola Saha, "Learning from Peers at the Wireless Edge", 2020 International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworkS (COMSNETS 2020)
  7. Priti Pachpande, Monette Khadr, Hesham Hussien, Hany Elgala, and Dola Saha "Autoencoder Model for OFDM-based Optical Wireless Communication" OSA Advanced Photonics Congress (AP) 2019 (IPR, Networks, NOMA, SPPCom, PVLED) , 2019
  8. Michael Rahaim, Iman Abdalla, Moussa Ayyash, Hany Elgala, Abdallah Khreishah and Thomas Little, "Welcome to the CROWD: Design Decisions for Coexisting Radio and Optical Wireless Deployments", in IEEE Network , v.33 , 2019.
  9. Maqsood Careem, Monette Khadr, Ahmed F. Hussien, Dola Saha, Hany Elgala and Aveek Dutta, "CHRONOS: A Cloud based Hybrid RF-Optical Network Over Synchronous Links", in 2018 IEEE 5G World Forum (5GWF). pdf
  10. Ahmed F. Hussein, Hany Elgala and Thomas D.C. Little, "Evolution of Multi-Tier Transmission Towards 5G Li-Fi Networks", in 2018 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM). pdf
  11. Zhouchi Li, Sihua Shao, Abdallah Khreishah, Moussa Ayyash, Iman Abdalla, Hany Elgala, Michael Rahaim and Thomas Little, "Design and Implementation of a Hybrid RF-VLC System with Bandwidth Aggregation", in 2018 14th International Wireless Communications   Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC). pdf
  12. Tayyebeh Asgari Gashteroodkhani, Iresha Amarasekara, Aveek Dutta and Dola Saha, Architecture and Benchmark of an Experimental CRAN Platform over CPRI, in IEEE INFOCOM Workshops: Next-generation Open and Programmable Radio Access Networks (NG-OPERA 2024).
  13. Xue Wei and Dola Saha, WISE: Waveform Independent Signal Embedding for Covert Communication, in IEEE Transactions on Machine Learning in Communications and Networking (TMLCN) 2024.
     

Broader Impact

Educational activities:

Small modules have been incorporated in following courses as class projects:

  1. IECE 574: Modern Wireless Networks
  2. IECE 553: Cyber-Physical Systems
  3. IECE 572: Advanced Digital Communications

The platform has been used in multiple projects by both graduate and undergraduate students.

  1. PI Saha is advising a MS Project using CHRONOS platform (2024)
  2. co-PI Dutta is advising a Capstone Project using CHRONOS platform (2023-24)
  3. co-PI Elgala is advising a Capstone Project using CHRONOS platform (2023-24)
  4. PI Saha has advised a Capstone Project using CHRONOS platform (2020-21)


Outreach:

  1. The team participated in a webinar to discuss the project.
  2. The PI discussed the project in Guilderland Middle School 
  3. The platform was shown and demonstrated to Tech Valley High School. They were hosted in the lab during their Spring break.