Network on Target: Remotely Configured Adaptive Tactical Networks

2006

Adding mobility to sensor networks can significantly increase the capability of the sensor network by making it resilient to failures, reactive to events, and able to support disparate missions with a common set of sensors. Mobility in sensor networks may be controllable, and hence be used to help achieve the network's missions. That is, mobility may be "purposeful" instead of being treated as an uncontrollable external stimulus to which the ad-hoc networks must respond. To make use of the purposeful mobility, we propose techniques for mobility assisted sensing and routing considering the computation complexity, network connectivity, energy consumption of both communications and movement, and the network lifetime. We also define utility functions that can capture the benefits of the movement from the perspective of all missions, and maximize the capability of the network.

2014 6th International Congress on Ultra Modern Telecommunications and Control Systems and Workshops (ICUMT), 2014

Data acquisition is an important task to provide context awareness of a military operation scenario in order to support informed decisions. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) play a remarkable service in this context by collecting data on remote areas to support decision support systems in control centers. However, due to the nature of the locations where they are deployed, it is out of the question provision a conventional communication infrastructure to access them. Thus, alternative communications approaches have to be used, such as relay links via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying over the sensor network deployed on the ground. However, solutions based on this approach often propose intermittent connectivity to the WSN and/or exclusive use of the UAVs to support this connectivity. In this paper the problem is tackled by a self-organizing approach to control a UAV-relay network that provides persistent communication between WSN and back-end systems while the UAVs are not exclusively used for communication, but also have other missions to accomplish. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which increased the connectivity among UAVs nearly by a factor of three compared to the deployment without any relay algorithm.

2001 MILCOM Proceedings Communications for Network-Centric Operations: Creating the Information Force (Cat. No.01CH37277), 2001

Considering that management t constitutes one of the most important pieces of the overall military puzzle, this paper discusses various management approaches applied in tactical military networks. Specifically, the paper refers to 3G wireless military management systems presenting management/control operations, tasks and schemes that can guarantee battlefield supremacy. Also, the paper discusses several issues concerning the migration of current tactical management systems to open, flexible and modular systems, which cover current needs and can be readily adaptable to tomorrow's changing requirements.

Due to its self-configuring nature, the tactical mobile ad hoc network is used for communications between tactical units and the command and control center (CCC) in battlefields, where communication infrastructure is not available. However, when a tactical unit moves far away from the CCC or there are geographical constraints, the data link between two communicating nodes can be broken, which results in an invalid data route from the tactical units to CCC. In order to address this problem, in this paper we propose a hierarchical connectivity maintenance scheme, namely ADLCoM (Autonomous Data Link Connectivity Maintenance). In ADLCoM, each tactical unit has one or more GW (gateway), which checks the status of data links between tactical units. If there is a possibility of link breakage, GWs request ground or aerial unmanned vehicles to become a relay for the data link. The simulation results, based on tactical scenarios, show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the net...

2002

The paper describes development of a generic architecture for the intelligent reconfiguration of the wireless mobile networks within the EC funded Framework V CAST Project. The CAST demonstrator, currently being developed and integrated, is intended to evaluate some of the fundamental concepts of the proposed architecture, within the technological constraints presently available. Here, we present a generic distributed architecture and discuss problems associated with the organic-based intelligent support, network management, resource optimisation and control, and object orientated reconfiguration of resources.

2010

Upon completion of this Ph.D. dissertation, I found myself profoundly indebted to many people who had provided tremendous support and unconditional assistance along the way. First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest appreciation to both of my academic advisers, Professor David J. Lilja and Professor Tian He, for their guidance, encouragement, support, and patience throughout years of my graduate school career. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Lilja for providing assistance ranging from fulfilling a simple administrative request to providing in-depth research advice throughout years in graduate school. My gratitude also goes to Professor He for accepting me into his research group and his willingness to collaborate independent research work with me. His continuous

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 1999

The Rapidly Deployable Radio Network (RDRN) is an architecture and experimental system to develop and evaluate hardware and software components suitable for implementing mobile, rapidly deployable, and adaptive wireless communications systems. The driving application for the RDRN is the need to quickly establish a communications infrastructure following a natural disaster, during a law enforcement activity, or rapid deployment of military force. The RDRN project incorporates digitally controlled antenna beams, programmable radios, adaptive protocols at the link layer, and mobile node management. This paper describes the architecture for the Rapidly Deployable Radio Network and a prototype system built to evaluate key system components.

MILCOM 2016 - 2016 IEEE Military Communications Conference, 2016

Tactical Edge Networks provide one of the most challenging communication environments. In order to cope with node mobility, constrained resources, and link unreliability, communication solutions designed for Tactical Edge Networks typically present highly configurable interfaces to be adaptable for various networking conditions. However, the extreme dynamicity and heterogeneity of tactical scenarios call for network-aware, adaptive communication systems that continuously re-tune their configuration parameters to match the ever-changing network conditions. This paper presents the Dynamic Detect and Adapt Mechanism (DDAM) of the Agile Communication Middleware, a distributed solution to perform network monitoring and communication adaptation specifically designed for Tactical Edge Networks. The present work focuses on two components of the DDAM: NetSensor, which provides efficient monitoring of the network status, and NetSupervisor, which is responsible for characterizing the network technology used to connect a pair of nodes in the network. The presented results show that our solution can accurately identify the technology used to establish links between nodes.

2009

ABSTRACT Net-Centric Information Management (IM) and sharing in tactical environments promises to revolutionize forward command and control capabilities by providing ubiquitous shared situational awareness to the warfighter. This vision can be realized by leveraging the tactical and Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) which provide the underlying communications infrastructure, but, significant technical challenges remain.

Computer Communications, 2015

Nowadays, spontaneous wireless networks enabled by mobile end-user devices (e.g. smartphones or tablets) are receiving considerable interest due the possibility to offer a wide range of novel, highly pervasive and user-centric network services and applications. In this paper, we focus on emergency-related scenarios, and we investigate the potential of spontaneous networks for providing Internet connectivity over the emergency area through the sharing of resources owned by the end-user devices. Novel and extremely flexible network deployment strategies are required in order to cope with the user mobility, the limited communication capabilities of wireless devices, and the intrinsic dinamicity of traffic loads and QoS requirements. To this purpose, we propose here a novel approach toward the deployment of spontaneous networks composed by a new generation of wireless devices -called Stem Nodes (SNs) to emphasize their ability to cover multiple network roles (e.g. gateway, router). The self-organization of the spontaneous network is then achieved through the local reconfiguration of each SN. Two complementary research contributions are provided. First, we describe the software architecture of a SN (which can be implemented on top of existing end-user devices), and we detail how a SN can manage its role set, eventually extending it through cooperation with other SNs. Second, we propose distributed algorithms, based on swarm intelligence principles, through which each SN can autonously select its role, and self-elect to gateways or routers, so that end-to-end performance are maximized while the lifetime of the spontaneous emergency network is prolonged. The ability of the proposed algorithm to guarantee adaptive and self-organizing network behaviours is demostrated through extensive Omnet++ simulations, and through a prototype implementation of the SN architecture on a real testbed.