Alessandro Morelli

Enabling the deployment of COTS applications in tactical edge networks

The increasing adoption of COTS hardware and software technologies in tactical scenarios raises the issue of supporting the deployment of legacy and COTS applications in extremely dynamic and challenging environments such as tactical edge networks (TENs). COTS applications adopt standards devised for wired Internet environments or corporate networks, such as service oriented architectures, and TCP and UDP, thus exhibiting severe reliability and performance problems on TENs. To support the reuse and deployment of COTS applications in TENs, there is the need to develop solutions that mediate the application requirements with the communication semantics of TENs. This article presents an overview of the challenges in deploying COTS applications in TENs and presents NetProxy, a state-of-the-art solution explicitly designed to address them.

Agile Communication Middleware for Next-Generation Mobile Heterogeneous Networks

The challenges issued by next-generation mobile communication scenarios clearly emphasize the inadequacy of traditional communication solutions in supporting efficient mobile and pervasive applications. Research so far has focused on higher-layer middleware or on the optimization of TCP-based solutions for wireless environments, but theres an obvious need to focus on communication middleware that can provide the right set of concepts and tools to support future applications.

Information-Centric Networking in next-generation communications scenarios

Next-generation networking environments, characterized by the overlapping of wireless networks of different types, are emerging as a new and extremely interesting scenario. Their high dynamicity and heterogeneity present significant challenges from the communications perspective, which call for the adoption of new paradigms based on opportunistic and Information-Centric Networking (ICN) approaches. Applications operating in next-generation environments have peculiar characteristics that could benefit from ICN-based middleware solutions. This paper presents ICeDiM, a middleware we designed for ICN communications in next-generation scenarios, which builds on top of the innovative concept of Application-level Dissemination Channels (ADCs) with tunable permeability levels. A thorough and in-depth experimental evaluation of ICeDiM in a next-generation environment realistically simulated using ICeONE, a modified version of the well-known ONE simulator, demonstrates that our approach can achieve very good performance levels in terms of delivery ratio and network resource consumption.

Leveraging Internet of Things within the military network environment — Challenges and solutions

The widespread adoption of IoT technologies will significantly affect many aspects of military operations. A growing number of battlefield assets will soon become networked entities, thanks to capillary and high density personal and environment sensors systems. The accurate and fine-grained information gathered could significantly benefit military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations, facilitate automated supply chain logistics, and facilitate urban operations in mega-city environments. To achieve these goals, research has to address several issues, such as reconciling the differences between commercial IoT architectural patterns and military network architectures, interoperability between different IoT systems, data processing and information management, and realization of resource-efficient IoT middleware solutions. The resource constrained tactical networking environment makes this research agenda particularly challenging but also pressing in terms of the need for novel middleware solutions.

SPF: An SDN-based middleware solution to mitigate the IoT information explosion

Managing the extremely large volume of information generated by Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, estimated to be in excess of 400 ZB per year by 2018, is going to be an increasingly relevant issue. Most of the approaches to IoT information management proposed so far, based on the collection of IoT-generated raw data for storage and processing in the Cloud, place a significant burden on both communications and computational resources, and introduce significant latency. IoT applications would instead benefit from new paradigms to enable definition and deployment of dynamic IoT services and facilitate their use of computational resources at the edge of the network for data analysis purposes, and from smart dissemination solutions to deliver the processed information to consumers. This paper presents SPF (as in “Sieve, Process, and Forward”), an SDN solution which extends the reference ONF architecture replacing the Data Plane with an Information Processing and Dissemination Plane. By leveraging programmable information processors deployed at the Internet/IoT edge and disruption tolerant information dissemination solutions, SPF allows to define and manage IoT applications and services and represents a promising architecture for future urban computing applications.

Agile Computing Middleware Support for Service-Oriented Computing over Tactical Networks

Service-oriented architectures (SoAs) are a popular paradigm for enterprise and data center computing but normally do not perform well on tactical networks, which are often degraded in terms of bandwidth, reliability, latency, and connectivity. This paper presents the agile computing middleware and in particular a transparent network proxy and associated protocols that help address the impedance mismatch that occurs between SoAs and tactical and DIL (Disconnected, Intermittent, and Limited) networks.

A Proxy Gateway Solution to Provide QoS in Tactical Networks and Disaster Recovery Scenarios

Many important public services, such as security and public health, as well as the modern tactical military scenarios, rely on Service-oriented Architectures (SoAs) and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components to enable the quick development and deployment of distributed services to respond quickly, reduce costs, and ease system integration. However, SoAs make use of verbose networking technologies and require reliable and relatively high bandwidth communications. Tactical scenarios normally cannot rely on such infrastructure and events like natural disasters can severely damage the network infrastructure in rural and urban environments. Thus, there is a need to develop solutions that provide SoA-based application and services running on heterogeneous and often constrained devices that compose tactical and mobile ad-hoc networks with Quality of Service (QoS) levels that meet their requirements. This paper presents the QoS-enabling features and the gateway operational mode (GM) of ACM NetProxy, the network proxy component of a communications middleware specifically developed to support applications in challenged networks. GM allows nodes in an ad-hoc wireless network to be quickly organized and to shape outbound communications to reduce bandwidth consumption and provide QoS. Experimental results obtained during a test in a field demonstration event show its efficiency.

Extending Service-Oriented Architectures to the tactical edge

Service Oriented Architectures allow for seamless integration of heterogeneous systems and extensive service reuse; characteristics that led to a wide adoption of this paradigm in the enterprise and military environment. While SoAs are currently deployed in tactical environments mainly at higher-echelon levels, it is necessary to allow for the exchange of information all the way down to the edge nodes deployed on the ground and back. Because most SoAs implementations were designed to work on reliable infrastructure networks, porting SoAs to the tactical environment requires a complete redesign of the protocol stack to support unreliable, transiently disconnected networks. In this paper, we present our approach to integrate the U.S. Marine Corpss Marine Command and Control Systems and Applications SoA (MC2SA SoA) with DisServicePro, a middleware that supports proactive dissemination and information on demand in tactical edge networks.

DDAM: Dynamic network condition detection and communication adaptation in Tactical Edge Networks

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.

A content and context-aware solution for network state exchange in tactical networks

Efficient network communications are essential to enable network-centric warfare. However, tactical edge networks present an extremely challenging and heterogeneous networking environment due to heterogeneous architectures, dynamic topologies, unwanted adversarial behavior, interference, and other wireless channel conditions. In order to support end-user applications and guarantee system performance and interoperability in such constrained environments, it is critical to adapt the volume and type of traffic generated by applications to the continuously varying network conditions. To this end, we extended the Agile Computing Middleware (ACM) with capabilities specifically designed to provide network state detection and adaptation in constrained networks. In this paper, we present SENSEI (for Smart Estimation of Network StatE Information), a set of components of the ACM that provides effective strategies for the dissemination of network state information. SENSEI implements a content- and context-aware clustering-based algorithm for the distribution of network state information that can significantly reduce the overhead associated with network state information sharing.