Modern communication devices are becoming an increasingly vital part of society and everyday life. These technologies provide users with the ability to conveniently and instantaneously perform vital services and tasks. To meet this growing area of development, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a new investment of over $37 million to catalyze research pertaining to the development of intelligent, resilient, and reliable next generation — or NextG — networks. The public-private investment, Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation Systems (RINGS) seeks to increase the competitiveness of the U.S. NextG networking and computing technologies to ensure the security and resilience of our systems.

Partnered with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD R&E), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and a multitude of industry partners, the RINGS program is NSF’s single largest effort to date to engage public and private partners to jointly support a research program. Industry partners include Apple, Ericsson, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm, and VMware.

“The RINGS program is a visionary and ambitious effort that will benefit many critical aspects of societal infrastructure, and will have long-term, transformational impacts on the next generation of network systems,” said NSF Division of Computer and Network Systems Director Gurdip Singh.

In October 2020, the Computing Research Association published a white paper, Computing Research Challenges in Next Generation Wireless Networking to outline research challenges relating to wireless networks and provide recommendations for research directions that  address these challenges.

The RINGS program is funding 37 awardees. The full list of sponsored reach centers can be found here.