CCI Researcher Gets NSF Grant to Strengthen 6G

Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) researcher Joao Santos has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CISE CORE grant to research strategies for improving the resilience of 6G networks to compromised infrastructure due to cyberattacks and failures.

Santos, a CCI research assistant professor, will serve as principal investigator (PI) on the three-year project on natively resilient 6G networks, funded at $552,893.

Jacek Kibilda, a CCI research associate professor, and Luiz DaSilva, executive director of CCI, will be the co-PIs. The CCI researchers will also collaborate with Michalis Matthaiou, at the Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland,  Nicola Marchetti, at Trinity College Dublin, and Indrakshi Dey, at the Walton Institute, both in the Republic of Ireland.

"Mobile networks are critical infrastructure of national interest worldwide  — so our efforts to secure them must be just as global," said Santos. 

Mobile networks have different strategies for responding to disturbances and anomalies, such as overprovisioning or allocating resources elastically to create redundancies in the network. However, these strategies possess an inherent limitation, as they rely on the reallocation of existing resources for the network to remain operational. 

Mobile networks are increasingly becoming targets of cyberattacks. This raises a critical question: What happens when a network's infrastructure is compromised, rendering a significant portion of its resources unavailable?

In such a scenario, the challenge becomes even bigger: How can a mobile network remain operational if it lacks resources to be reallocated?

The research will focus on leveraging the concept of network fungibility — the equivalency between different network resources, functions, and components to achieve the same purposes  — to create new types of redundancies and propose new resource management strategies.

Future 6G networks could see a new degree of freedom to withstand and recover from disruptions caused by compromised network infrastructure due to cyberattacks and failures.

Working with the World

The NSF grant is part of a U.S.-Ireland R&D Partnership program designed to strengthen collaboration among researchers from the United States, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland. 

Each team member brings unique and complementary expertise, including wireless communications, complex systems science, agent-based modeling and game theory, wireless physical layer and reflective intelligent surfaces, software-defined wireless networks, stochastic wireless network modeling, and radio resource management. 

This international partnership will enable researchers to combine expertise to achieve outcomes and cause an impact that would not be possible working independently.

For more information, contact CCI Communications and Marketing Director Michele McDonald at mmcdonald@vt.edu.