ABSTRACT Ramsey Theory studies the existence of highly regular patterns within a large system or ... more ABSTRACT Ramsey Theory studies the existence of highly regular patterns within a large system or a set of randomly selected points or numbers. The role of Ramsey Numbers is to quantify some of the general existential theorems in Ramsey Theory. Attempting to find ...
Mobile agents are programs with the additional capability to move between computers across a netw... more Mobile agents are programs with the additional capability to move between computers across a network connection. Movement implies that the running program that constitutes an agent moves from one system to another, taking with the agent the code that constitutes the agent as well as the state information of the agent. The movement of agents may be user-directed or self-directed (i.e. autonomous). In the case of user-directed movement, agents are configured with an itinerary that dictates the movement of the agents. In the case of self-directed movement, agents may move in order to better optimize their operation. Mobility may also be a combination of user- and self-directedness. Mobile agents provide three basic capabilities: mobile code, mobile computation, and mobile state. These three capabilities are shown in the figure below. Each of the capabilities is an evolution of previously well-established notions in distributed and networked systems. Mobile computation involves moving a computation from one system to another. This capability is an evolution of remote computation, which allows a system to tap into the computational resources of another system over a network connection. One of the original mechanisms for remote computation was Remote Procedure Call (RPC). Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is another example of remote computation as are servlets and stored procedures. The difference between mobile and remote computation is that mobile computation supports network disconnection. In a traditional remote computation model, the system requesting the service (the client) must remain connected to the system providing the service (the server) for the duration of the remote computation operation. Additionally, depending on the interface exposed by the server, an interaction can require an arbitrary number of messages between client and server. If network connectivity is lost, the remote computation will become an orphaned computation that will either be terminated or whose results will be discarded. A mobile computation, on the other hand, is an autonomous entity. Once the computation moves from the first system (which may nominally be called the client) to the second system (the server), the computation continues to execute on the server even if the client becomes disconnected. The agent returns to the client with the results of the computation when (and if) the connectivity is recovered. Mobile Code is the ability to move code from one system to another. The code may be either source code that is compiled or interpreted or binary code. Binary code may further be either machine dependent or be some intermediate, machine-independent form. Mobile code is used in other contexts besides mobile agents. For example, system administrators use mobile code in order to remotely install or upgrade software on client systems. Similarly, a web browser uses mobile code to pull an applet or script to execute as part of a web page. Code may be mobile in two different ways: push and pull. In the push model, the system sending the code originates the code transfer operation whereas in the pull model, the system receiving the code originates the code transfer operation. An example of the pull model is a Web browser downloading components such as applets or scripts. Remote installation is an example of the push model. Mobile agent systems use the push model of code mobility. Pull mobility is often considered to be more secure and trustworthy because the host receiving the code is the one that requested the code. Usually, the origin of the request lies in some action carried out by a user of the system and hence pull mobility is superficially more secure. Push mobility on the other hand allows a system to send code to the receiving system at unexpected or unmonitored times. Hence push mobility is less trustworthy from a user’s point of view. In practice the overwhelming majority of security exploits encountered in distributed systems originates in careless user actions such as running mail attachments. Mobile code allows systems to be extremely flexible. New capabilities can be downloaded to systems on the fly thereby dynamically adding features or upgrading existing features. Moreover, if capabilities can be downloaded on demand, temporarily unused capabilities can also be discarded. Swapping capabilities on an as-needed basis allows systems to support small memory constrained devices. Discarding capabilities after use can also help improve system security. Mobile state is an evolution of state capture, which allows the execution state of a process to be captured. State capture has been traditionally used for checkpointing systems to protect against unexpected system failure. In the event of a failure, the execution of a process can be restarted from the last checkpointed state thereby not wasting time by starting from the very beginning. Checkpointing is thus very useful for long-running processes. Operating system…
2019 International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS)
The Anglova scenario was developed as part of the NATO IST-124 Research Task Group on Improving C... more The Anglova scenario was developed as part of the NATO IST-124 Research Task Group on Improving Connectivity and Network Efficiency in Heterogeneous Tactical Networks. Since then, it has been successfully used to conduct emulation-based experimentation by multiple groups. This paper describes extensions to the Anglova scenario for the purpose of experimentation within an Urban environment. In particular, the focus is on Vignette 3 and its extension for the new IST-168 Research Task Group on Adaptive Information Processing and Distribution for Command and Control.
Proceedings of the 2022 Workshop on Advanced tools, programming languages, and PLatforms for Implementing and Evaluating algorithms for Distributed systems
MILCOM 2019 - 2019 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM), 2019
This paper reviews the definitions and characteristics of military effects, the Internet of Battl... more This paper reviews the definitions and characteristics of military effects, the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT), and their impact on decision processes in a Multi-Domain Operating environment (MDO). The aspects of contemporary military decision-processes are illustrated and an MDO Effect Loop decision process is introduced. We examine the concept of IoBT effects and their implications in MDO. These implications suggest that when considering the concept of MDO, as a doctrine, the technological advances of IoBTs empower enhancements in decision frameworks and increase the viability of novel operational approaches and options for military effects.
2019 International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS), 2019
Although ever more and powerful information collection, processing, storage, and communication de... more Although ever more and powerful information collection, processing, storage, and communication devices are available, disadvantaged battlefield connectivity currently prevents full exploitation of the potentially available information. An infrastructure for adaptive information processing and distribution may improve this situation by providing advanced and autonomous orchestration mechanisms for real-time data exchange and service execution. This paper provides an overview of the work being done on this topic within the NATO IST-168 RTG: its ambition, architectural approach and status.
2021 IEEE 7th World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT), 2021
The rapid advancement of IoT technologies has led to its flexible adoption in battle field networ... more The rapid advancement of IoT technologies has led to its flexible adoption in battle field networks, known as Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) networks. One important application of IoBT networks is the weather sensory network characterized with a variety of weather, land and environmental sensors. This data contains hidden trends and correlations, needed to provide situational awareness to soldiers and commanders. To interpret the incoming data in real-time, machine learning algorithms are required to automate strategic decision-making. Existing solutions are not well-equipped to provide the fine-grained feedback to military personnel and cannot facilitate a scalable, end-to-end platform for fast unlabeled data collection, cleaning, querying, analysis and threats identification. In this work, we present a scalable end-to-end IoBT data driven platform for SVAD (Storage, Visualization, Anomaly Detection) analysis of heterogeneous weather sensor data. Our SVAD platform includes extensive data cleaning techniques to denoise efficiently data to differentiate data from anomalies and noise data instances. We perform comparative analysis of unsupervised machine learning algorithms for multi-variant data analysis and experimental evaluation of different data ingestion pipelines to show the ability of the SVAD platform for (near) real-time processing. Our results indicate impending turbulent weather conditions that can be detected by early anomaly identification and detection techniques.
2018 International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS), 2018
This paper addresses a scenario where a medium sized smart city in an Alliance nation has been st... more This paper addresses a scenario where a medium sized smart city in an Alliance nation has been struck by disaster. A small, multi-national force is deployed for disaster relief. Situational awareness (SA) is important so that resources, including personnel and supplies, may be prioritized to have the most impact and help those in the most need. This SA can be significantly enhanced via information obtained from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, especially in a smart city environment. This paper, which presents work performed by the NATO IST-147 “Military Applications of Internet of Things” group, explores the potential to exploit smart city IoT capabilities in military operations.
2017 International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS), 2017
Emulation environments are an effective approach to experimenting with and evaluating network pro... more Emulation environments are an effective approach to experimenting with and evaluating network protocols, algorithms, and components. This paper describes a joint effort by the NATO Science & Technology Organization's IST-124 Research Task Group to evaluate the scalability of OLSRv1 and OLSRv2 in an emulation environment within a military scenario. The scenario includes detailed mobility patterns for a battalion-sized operation, which has been developed by military experts in planning and executing live exercises. The mobility patterns are used to drive the network emulation. The scalability of OLSRv1 and OLSRv2 (with and without MPR) is assessed by emulating different network sizes and estimating the overhead. Moreover, the unicast packet delivery ratio is calculated for the different OLSR configurations. The results show that with the chosen OLSR update rates, only OLSRv2 with MPR mechanism scales up to 96 nodes.
The LoRaWAN communication protocol has gained significant adoption within commercial IoT systems ... more The LoRaWAN communication protocol has gained significant adoption within commercial IoT systems through support for low power, long range transmission. LoRaWAN’s growing usage in cities and civilian infrastructure has prompted investigation into its potential usage within military systems for supporting urban operations, involving expanded research on LoRa signal coverage in the presence of urban infrastructure. Through the use of a supporting Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) IoT architecture, a set of experiments were conducted in New York City aimed at testing LoRa signal coverage in both indoor and outdoor settings. Performance was compared for different transmission configurations on the North American Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) 915 MHz band. This work is seen as a key step to better understand the suitability and applicability of civilian IoT communication protocols to augment and enhance tactical C2 systems for urban operations.
ABSTRACT Ramsey Theory studies the existence of highly regular patterns within a large system or ... more ABSTRACT Ramsey Theory studies the existence of highly regular patterns within a large system or a set of randomly selected points or numbers. The role of Ramsey Numbers is to quantify some of the general existential theorems in Ramsey Theory. Attempting to find ...
Mobile agents are programs with the additional capability to move between computers across a netw... more Mobile agents are programs with the additional capability to move between computers across a network connection. Movement implies that the running program that constitutes an agent moves from one system to another, taking with the agent the code that constitutes the agent as well as the state information of the agent. The movement of agents may be user-directed or self-directed (i.e. autonomous). In the case of user-directed movement, agents are configured with an itinerary that dictates the movement of the agents. In the case of self-directed movement, agents may move in order to better optimize their operation. Mobility may also be a combination of user- and self-directedness. Mobile agents provide three basic capabilities: mobile code, mobile computation, and mobile state. These three capabilities are shown in the figure below. Each of the capabilities is an evolution of previously well-established notions in distributed and networked systems. Mobile computation involves moving a computation from one system to another. This capability is an evolution of remote computation, which allows a system to tap into the computational resources of another system over a network connection. One of the original mechanisms for remote computation was Remote Procedure Call (RPC). Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is another example of remote computation as are servlets and stored procedures. The difference between mobile and remote computation is that mobile computation supports network disconnection. In a traditional remote computation model, the system requesting the service (the client) must remain connected to the system providing the service (the server) for the duration of the remote computation operation. Additionally, depending on the interface exposed by the server, an interaction can require an arbitrary number of messages between client and server. If network connectivity is lost, the remote computation will become an orphaned computation that will either be terminated or whose results will be discarded. A mobile computation, on the other hand, is an autonomous entity. Once the computation moves from the first system (which may nominally be called the client) to the second system (the server), the computation continues to execute on the server even if the client becomes disconnected. The agent returns to the client with the results of the computation when (and if) the connectivity is recovered. Mobile Code is the ability to move code from one system to another. The code may be either source code that is compiled or interpreted or binary code. Binary code may further be either machine dependent or be some intermediate, machine-independent form. Mobile code is used in other contexts besides mobile agents. For example, system administrators use mobile code in order to remotely install or upgrade software on client systems. Similarly, a web browser uses mobile code to pull an applet or script to execute as part of a web page. Code may be mobile in two different ways: push and pull. In the push model, the system sending the code originates the code transfer operation whereas in the pull model, the system receiving the code originates the code transfer operation. An example of the pull model is a Web browser downloading components such as applets or scripts. Remote installation is an example of the push model. Mobile agent systems use the push model of code mobility. Pull mobility is often considered to be more secure and trustworthy because the host receiving the code is the one that requested the code. Usually, the origin of the request lies in some action carried out by a user of the system and hence pull mobility is superficially more secure. Push mobility on the other hand allows a system to send code to the receiving system at unexpected or unmonitored times. Hence push mobility is less trustworthy from a user’s point of view. In practice the overwhelming majority of security exploits encountered in distributed systems originates in careless user actions such as running mail attachments. Mobile code allows systems to be extremely flexible. New capabilities can be downloaded to systems on the fly thereby dynamically adding features or upgrading existing features. Moreover, if capabilities can be downloaded on demand, temporarily unused capabilities can also be discarded. Swapping capabilities on an as-needed basis allows systems to support small memory constrained devices. Discarding capabilities after use can also help improve system security. Mobile state is an evolution of state capture, which allows the execution state of a process to be captured. State capture has been traditionally used for checkpointing systems to protect against unexpected system failure. In the event of a failure, the execution of a process can be restarted from the last checkpointed state thereby not wasting time by starting from the very beginning. Checkpointing is thus very useful for long-running processes. Operating system…
2019 International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS)
The Anglova scenario was developed as part of the NATO IST-124 Research Task Group on Improving C... more The Anglova scenario was developed as part of the NATO IST-124 Research Task Group on Improving Connectivity and Network Efficiency in Heterogeneous Tactical Networks. Since then, it has been successfully used to conduct emulation-based experimentation by multiple groups. This paper describes extensions to the Anglova scenario for the purpose of experimentation within an Urban environment. In particular, the focus is on Vignette 3 and its extension for the new IST-168 Research Task Group on Adaptive Information Processing and Distribution for Command and Control.
Proceedings of the 2022 Workshop on Advanced tools, programming languages, and PLatforms for Implementing and Evaluating algorithms for Distributed systems
MILCOM 2019 - 2019 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM), 2019
This paper reviews the definitions and characteristics of military effects, the Internet of Battl... more This paper reviews the definitions and characteristics of military effects, the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT), and their impact on decision processes in a Multi-Domain Operating environment (MDO). The aspects of contemporary military decision-processes are illustrated and an MDO Effect Loop decision process is introduced. We examine the concept of IoBT effects and their implications in MDO. These implications suggest that when considering the concept of MDO, as a doctrine, the technological advances of IoBTs empower enhancements in decision frameworks and increase the viability of novel operational approaches and options for military effects.
2019 International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS), 2019
Although ever more and powerful information collection, processing, storage, and communication de... more Although ever more and powerful information collection, processing, storage, and communication devices are available, disadvantaged battlefield connectivity currently prevents full exploitation of the potentially available information. An infrastructure for adaptive information processing and distribution may improve this situation by providing advanced and autonomous orchestration mechanisms for real-time data exchange and service execution. This paper provides an overview of the work being done on this topic within the NATO IST-168 RTG: its ambition, architectural approach and status.
2021 IEEE 7th World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT), 2021
The rapid advancement of IoT technologies has led to its flexible adoption in battle field networ... more The rapid advancement of IoT technologies has led to its flexible adoption in battle field networks, known as Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) networks. One important application of IoBT networks is the weather sensory network characterized with a variety of weather, land and environmental sensors. This data contains hidden trends and correlations, needed to provide situational awareness to soldiers and commanders. To interpret the incoming data in real-time, machine learning algorithms are required to automate strategic decision-making. Existing solutions are not well-equipped to provide the fine-grained feedback to military personnel and cannot facilitate a scalable, end-to-end platform for fast unlabeled data collection, cleaning, querying, analysis and threats identification. In this work, we present a scalable end-to-end IoBT data driven platform for SVAD (Storage, Visualization, Anomaly Detection) analysis of heterogeneous weather sensor data. Our SVAD platform includes extensive data cleaning techniques to denoise efficiently data to differentiate data from anomalies and noise data instances. We perform comparative analysis of unsupervised machine learning algorithms for multi-variant data analysis and experimental evaluation of different data ingestion pipelines to show the ability of the SVAD platform for (near) real-time processing. Our results indicate impending turbulent weather conditions that can be detected by early anomaly identification and detection techniques.
2018 International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS), 2018
This paper addresses a scenario where a medium sized smart city in an Alliance nation has been st... more This paper addresses a scenario where a medium sized smart city in an Alliance nation has been struck by disaster. A small, multi-national force is deployed for disaster relief. Situational awareness (SA) is important so that resources, including personnel and supplies, may be prioritized to have the most impact and help those in the most need. This SA can be significantly enhanced via information obtained from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, especially in a smart city environment. This paper, which presents work performed by the NATO IST-147 “Military Applications of Internet of Things” group, explores the potential to exploit smart city IoT capabilities in military operations.
2017 International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS), 2017
Emulation environments are an effective approach to experimenting with and evaluating network pro... more Emulation environments are an effective approach to experimenting with and evaluating network protocols, algorithms, and components. This paper describes a joint effort by the NATO Science & Technology Organization's IST-124 Research Task Group to evaluate the scalability of OLSRv1 and OLSRv2 in an emulation environment within a military scenario. The scenario includes detailed mobility patterns for a battalion-sized operation, which has been developed by military experts in planning and executing live exercises. The mobility patterns are used to drive the network emulation. The scalability of OLSRv1 and OLSRv2 (with and without MPR) is assessed by emulating different network sizes and estimating the overhead. Moreover, the unicast packet delivery ratio is calculated for the different OLSR configurations. The results show that with the chosen OLSR update rates, only OLSRv2 with MPR mechanism scales up to 96 nodes.
The LoRaWAN communication protocol has gained significant adoption within commercial IoT systems ... more The LoRaWAN communication protocol has gained significant adoption within commercial IoT systems through support for low power, long range transmission. LoRaWAN’s growing usage in cities and civilian infrastructure has prompted investigation into its potential usage within military systems for supporting urban operations, involving expanded research on LoRa signal coverage in the presence of urban infrastructure. Through the use of a supporting Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) IoT architecture, a set of experiments were conducted in New York City aimed at testing LoRa signal coverage in both indoor and outdoor settings. Performance was compared for different transmission configurations on the North American Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) 915 MHz band. This work is seen as a key step to better understand the suitability and applicability of civilian IoT communication protocols to augment and enhance tactical C2 systems for urban operations.
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Papers by Niranjan Suri