Brian Haberman

Key Challenges of Military Tactical Networking and the Elusive Promise of MANET Technology

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are considered by many as fundamental to realizing the global information grid (GIG) and the vision of network-centric warfare. Indeed, a fully realized MANET would be powerful in enabling highly mobile, highly responsive, and quickly deployable tactical forces. However, significant technical challenges remain before this realization is viable. Addressing these deficiencies is a significant task that will require the invention and adoption of new technology. The goal of this article is not to declare these capabilities impossible to achieve. Rather, it is to manage the expectation of the capabilities achievable in the foreseeable future through edification on the technical difficulties standing between current technology and the desired capabilities. This article provides an overview of the military MANET problem space, describing the ideal military MANET solution. Several deficiencies are highlighted that exist between MANET technologies and the desired capability. Identified technical issues include system-level architecture, routing (both interior and exterior), management, security, and medium access control (MAC), with an emphasis on the former two areas

Overlapping particle swarms for energy-efficient routing in sensor networks

Sensor networks are traditionally built using battery-powered, collaborative devices. These sensor nodes do not rely on dedicated infrastructure services (e.g., routers) to relay data. Rather, a communal effort is employed where the sensor nodes both generate data as well as forward data for other nodes. A routing protocol is needed in order for the sensors to determine viable paths through the network, but routing protocols designed for wired networks and even ad hoc networks are not sufficient given the energy overhead needed to operate them. We propose an energy-aware routing protocol, based on overlapping swarms of particles, that offers reliable path selection while reducing the energy consumption for the route selection process. Our particle-based routing with overlapping swarms for energy-efficiency algorithm shows promise in extending the life of battery-powered networks while still providing robust routing functionality to maintain network reliability.

On the Eavesdrop Vulnerability of Random Network Coding over Wireless Networks

When random network coding is combined with path diversity, source data packets are mixed and distributed spatially across different parts of the network, providing some inherent protection against eavesdropping. In a wireless setting, the links may be of poor quality and are subject to intercept by a sophisticated eavesdropper at potentially significant distances from the network. Thus, this inherent protection against eavesdropping is likely to be fragile. In this paper, we propose a quantitative metric for eavesdrop vulnerability based on radio link budget considerations. Using the famous butterfly network as a simple example, we confirm that the wireless network is increasingly vulnerable as the eavesdroppers capabilities increase or the average link quality of the network degrades. Under critical conditions, the eavesdropper is able to decode session traffic with high reliability by observing the transmissions of any relay node---i.e., no security is provided at all.

MBA: a tool for multicast billing and accounting

IP multicast deployment has been slow due to several factors. One of the important reasons is a lack of support for debugging, accounting and billing services for multicast protocols. We propose a common framework that can be used to provide multiple multicast services efficiently. The framework collects information such as multicast router status, flow statistics and stores them in a database. The data could be used for debugging, traffic engineering, accounting and billing. We illustrate the use of the framework for accounting and billing. We describe a prototype implementation of our approach. Our contributions include a protocol independent tree discovery mechanism and an efficient algorithm for per-receiver accounting.

Comparative performance and scaling of the pareto improving particle swarm optimization algorithm

The Pareto Improving Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PI-PSO) has been shown to perform better than Global Best PSO on a variety of benchmark problems. However, these experiments used benchmark problems with a single dimension, namely 32d. Here we compare global best PSO and PI-PSO on benchmark problems of varying dimensions and with varying numbers of particles. The experiments show that PI-PSO generally achieves better performance than PSO as the number of dimensions increases. PI-PSO also outperforms PSO on problems with the same dimension but with the same or fewer particles.

A hybrid 802.16/802.11 network architecture for a united states coastal area network

This paper presents a concept for a United States Coastal Area Network (U-SCAN) that is comprised of IEEE 802.11, 802.16, and satellite communications technologies. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) on behalf of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) has tasked The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) to perform an architectural study into the establishment of a United States Coastal Area Network (U-SCAN). The goal of this study is to define a wireless network architecture that can be deployed to enable contiguous coastal area network coverage for scientific, commercial, and homeland security (e.g. Coast Guard) applications within the United States Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), in a manner that is flexible, manageable, and affordable. The JHU/APL study will ultimately provide recommendations to NOPP regarding potential network architectures and technologies that could provide the desired capability, with a particular focus on commercial (both existing and emerging) technologies. This paper presents the envisioned U-SCAN architecture, and presents the envisioned technical capabilities and shortcomings of the component candidate technologies.