SCyPSCenter for Smart Cyber-Physical Systems, UMass Lowell
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Research thrusts

Next-generation networks and trusted devices

How do you build networks that carry cyber-physical traffic at the speed AI needs, and devices at the edge that can be trusted?

Every cyber-physical loop runs over a network and ends at a device. This thrust works on both ends: the optical and wireless transport that has to add capacity without losing it, the distributed systems that must stay correct under crashes and attacks, and the hardware, from grid edge controllers to printed electronics, that has to prove it is what it claims to be.

What the group builds

Multi-band and space-division optical networks

Planning and controlling networks that use several spectral bands and several fiber cores at once, with quality of transmission built into every allocation decision, and the open-source FUSION framework that lets others reproduce the results.

Fault-tolerant distributed and edge computing

Consensus and state machine replication that stay correct under crashes and attacks, blockchain systems, satellite-edge coordination, and digital twins delivered from hybrid clouds.

Zero trust for cyber-physical systems

Nothing on the network is trusted by default: every device proves what it is running, every measurement is checked, and every command is authenticated before an actuator obeys it. Zero trust was built for IT networks, where verification costs milliseconds; a protection relay may have only a few milliseconds in total, and legacy equipment cannot run modern cryptography, so the thrust works on zero trust that meets real-time deadlines on equipment that cannot be replaced, with hardware attestation and register-transfer-level trojan detection as its foundation.

Printed electronics for hard places

Flexible and high-temperature printed interfaces and bond joints, qualified with physics-informed AI so fewer parts have to be destroyed to prove a process.

Recent papers

The newest work from the faculty on this thrust. 75 papers since 2019 carry one of their names.

  1. A. Rezaee, F. Arpanaei, R. McCann, H. Rabbani, J. A. Hernández, M. Brandt-Pearce, V. M. Vokkarane
    QoT-Aware Dynamic Resource Allocation and Grooming in Multi-Band Space-Division Multiplexing Networks
    IEEE/Optica Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, vol. 18, no. 10, Oct. 2026IF 5.1 (2025)
  2. A. Rezaee, R. McCann, V. M. Vokkarane
    FUSION: A Unified Benchmarking Framework for Reproducible Optical Network Research
    IEEE/Optica Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, vol. 18, no. 9, pp. D90-D105, Sept. 2026 (Special Issue on Benchmarking in Optical Networks)IF 5.1 (2025)
  3. A. Rezaee, F. Arpanaei, R. McCann, L. Nadal, J. A. Hernández, V. M. Vokkarane
    QoT-Aware Spectral and Spatial Scaling Trade-offs in Multi-Band Space Division Multiplexing over EONs [Invited]
    IEEE/Optica Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, vol. 18, no. 8, pp. C160-C172, Aug. 2026IF 5.1 (2025)
  4. L. Tseng
    Timely Control for Quantum Cloud: Orchestrating Entanglement Under Decay
    3rd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Quantum Networks and Distributed Quantum Computing (QuNet), ACM SIGCOMM 2026, pp. 32-34, Aug. 2026
  5. B. R. Jyoti Arka, M. Z. Islam, Y. Lin, V. M. Vokkarane, J. Zhao
    Communication Network-Aware Missing Data Recovery for Enhanced Distribution Grid Visibility
    IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM), pp. 1-5, July 2026
  6. L. Tseng, K. Neupane, L. Ambarapu, M. Aloqaily
    NC-DHT: Designing DHT for Blockchain Systems: Robustness and Anonymity
    Cluster Computing, vol. 29, no. 5, June 2026IF 3.6 (2023)
  7. H. Rabbani, A. Rezaee, H. Rabbani, V. M. Vokkarane, M. Brandt-Pearce
    Experimental Determination of Filter Bandwidth Requirements for Coherent Pluggable Transceivers in Optical Data Center Networks
    IEEE International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR), pp. 1-5, June 2026
  8. L. Tseng, N. Yazdani-Motlagh
    Green, Trust-Minimizing, and Sybil-Resistant? Rethinking How Blockchains Agree from an Energy Perspective
    ACM Sustainability Week 2026, pp. 139-143, June 2026

All publications

Other thrusts

Most projects cut across two or three of them.

Resilient energy and infrastructureCyber-physical AIPeople in the loop