The AERPAW Control Framework - Considerations for Resource Control and Orchestration for a Computing-supported Physical Research Platform

The AERPAW project is an ambitious project, funded by the PAWR program of the US NSF, to create a remote accessible research platform for a research facility with some distinct features that makes its operational model unique, and possibly non-obvious to computing researchers more familiar with computing and networking testbeds. AERPAW is primarily a platform of physical resources - specifically the RF environment, and the airspace. Experimenters can explore them through radio transceivers and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, both under the Experimenter's programmatic control. The entire workflow of the remote Experimenter is through the mediation of virtual computing environments, but AERPAW Operators have to ensure that the Experimenter's programming controls the physical resources precisely as intended by the Experimenter, while also satisfying safety and compliance goals. To this end, the AERPAW platform adopts multiple distinct, and quite different, execution environments. This in turn gives something of a different color to the well-understood problems of resource allocation, scheduling, and access control. In this paper, we articulate lessons we have learned, and the challenges and considerations we have come to appreciate, in designing a resource control framework for such a physico-cyber facility.