The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to universities in the United Kingdom.
Living Edge Laboratory
The Edge Lab support ‘Edge Computing’ research, enabling us to consider a new class of applications (and underlying computational analysis algorithms) that are ‘latency-sensitive’. The Edge Lab consists of 100 nodes where each node comprises of Raspberry Pi 4 (with 4GB RAM), 32GB SD card, Grove Pi, Arduino Shield for Raspberry Pi, Arduino Base Shield, Temperature / Humidity, Light, Motion, Loudness, Air Quality, Dust, and a Camera. They also have interchangeable communication shields, Wifi, Bluetooth, Xbee socket, Xbee XBee-PRO® ZigBee, and Lora. Each node is installed within a case that allows easier deployment. Edge lab also has 3 Nvidia Jetson Nano and 3 Neural sticks. Further, we have over 200 different types of Grove sensors (3 of each type) that can be plugged into any node. The EPSRC Early Career Equipment fund supports this lab.
This project is focused on establishing a laboratory at Cardiff University to support ‘Edge Computing’ research, enabling us to consider a new class of applications (and underlying computational analysis algorithms) that are ‘latency-sensitive’. The laboratory will enable us to carry out our internationally leading research in cybersecurity, real-time data processing and communication networks. The laboratory will be realised by a combination of Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards that are distributed across open spaces and existing laboratories. These devices will be integrated with a variety of different sensing capabilities and security protocols, enabling data acquired from these sensors to be analysed ‘locally’ (i.e. in proximity to the sensing devices).
The Living Lab will allow us to design and dynamically modify data exchange and communications protocols, enabling comparison across different protocols (considering trade-offs such as speed of access vs security). The deployed nodes will be reconfigurable to run different edge computing use cases (e.g., scenarios with limited communication bandwidth). Furthermore, the Living Lab. will be a reconfigurable infrastructure, enabling modification to both the capability of each node and its location, i.e. we can re-deploy these sensor nodes in different buildings in order to evaluate the real impact (usefulness) of different architectural patterns (both old and new) using quantitative evidence (i.e., sensor data).
Team
Funding
EPSRC (ECR Capital Award)