This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 10651 including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, Introduction, and Conference Committee listing.

This paper will present the importance of focusing on and investigating the requirements for open digital communication architectures. Depending on the system that is being designed and implemented, a timing analysis of the overall control systems that comprise the whole system should be closely investigated using control systems analysis techniques. In doing so at an early stage of development, it would ensure the success of particular projects by bringing to light potential communication issues that would otherwise go unstudied. With systems that foster open architecture, it is important to note that having such an open system with plug and play capability may impose a great strain on a communication backbone. If this backbone were responsible for delivering time critical messages such as control system commands, then any latency that is imposed due to the communication backbone must be taken into consideration. Using frequency and time domain analysis, it is possible to highlight these areas and understand where most of the system degradation could occur if the communication latency were too high. With this in mind, one can determine the most appropriate physical layer and memory bandwidth requirements for each subsystem and an appropriate hub to route the data to the proper end recipient.

Open Architectures, and the Systems upon which they are based, span a wide variety of trade spaces - modularity vs performance, openness vs intellectual property and coverage vs extensibility among others. One trade space with a profound effect on architecture development and eventual adoption is the initial scope of the architecture itself. Traditional Open Architecture development approaches treat scoping as a search for a point solution on a spectrum that balances the needs of both specific adopting programs and broader Open Architecture communities of interest. In this paper we argue that it is beneficial to re-envision this trade space as a managed series of layered architecture decisions and architecture solutions in order to maximize value for all architecture stakeholders.

As open architecture (OA) standards become increasingly important to the Department of Defense (DoD) and in particular, the United States Air Force (USAF), so too does the need to be able to exercise, experiment, and validate interoperability with these standards. The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Sensor Directorate (AFRL/RYWA) has built an architecture and integration event called the Integrated Demonstration and Experimentation Architecture (IDEA) event. IDEA provides a realistic, adaptable government-owned reference architecture with capabilities to measure, control, and document performance benefits (or costs) for potential adopting programs; impacts of technology insertions; and insights into future OA standard growth. The IDEA event included industry and government organizations, that came together to demonstrate advanced integration capabilities in a rapid development environment using OAs, such as Open Mission Systems. The reference architecture includes multiple mission package subsystems and specialized tools for integration. The use of IDEA events to promote the evolution and integration of OA standards to meet current and future program needs will continue. This paper discusses the reference architecture used, the layout of the mission scenario for testing, and how the event was composed.

Government agencies and military are seeing a rise in drones used for terrorism, destruction and espionage. As recently as a decade ago, UAV technology has been used only by US military. Today, dozens of countries manufacture and operate military-grade drones. Drone technology has been made available around the world. Anyone can purchase a drone from an online retailer. Western military operations as well as critical infrastructure protection agencies experienced multiple drone incidents in the last years, ranging from the use of weaponized drones by ISIS to drones flying over airports or drones breaching airspace of other critical infrastructure. The emergence of threats caused by unfriendly or hostile drones requires a proactive drone detection in order to decide on appropriate defence actions. In this contribution, an open architecture of a UAV detection system including decision support for counter-action is presented. The system is composed of multiple deployable sensor stations, an operation center comprising the operational picture display and the decision support component, and a communication bus consisting of a message-oriented middleware connecting the sub-systems and components. The architectural design specifies the sub-systems, their constitutive components, the information and control flow between the components, the protocols used for data and information exchange, the functionality and responsibility of each component, and the functional parameters. The designed architecture provides a blueprint for a UAV detection and defence actions decision-making system which will allow public protection agencies and military to react timely against threats caused by hostile drones.

We present a model based engineering approach to study raised cosine and tapered cosine windowed on/off keying to maximize power per bandwidth and minimize bandwidth. We also present a second example looking at raised cosine modulation and bandwidth. Raised cosine windowing functions have significantly better (faster) power spectral density convergence than on/off keying rectangular windowing functions. A rectangular windowing function has a higher average power compared to a tapered window. With practical constraints, what raised cosine or tapered cosine window provides the highest average power, and minimizes the bandwidth? Maximum average power occurs for a rectangular pulse. Minimum average power occurs for a raised cosine windowing function. Worst case (largest) bandwidth occurs for a pulse waveform. Best case (minimum) bandwidth occurs for a raised cosine window. For bandwidth comparison, half-cycle raised cosine modulation (Feher modulation) frequency shift keying compared to standard frequency shift keying uses 23% bandwidth at the 99 % power bandwidth points and it provides a 19 dB improvement (reduction) in power spectral density at f_c ± 2f_sym (center frequency ± 2 times the symbol frequency). On a dB scale, the power in a tapered cosine pulse is comparable to a rectangular pulse. A tapered cosine with widths of rise = 1/4 , top = 1/2 , and fall = 1/4 has 69% of the power (-1.6 dB) in a rectangular pulse. A tapered cosine with widths of rise = 1/3 , top = 1/3 , and fall = 1/3 has 46% of the power (-3.4 dB) in a rectangular pulse. A raised cosine pulse contains 37% of the power (-4.3 dB) in a rectangular pulse. Raised cosine (Feher) frequency shift keying (FSK) contains line spectra. We will show the line spectra are caused by a constant output from repeated symbols. We illustrate how a small dither removes the line spectra present in raised cosine (Feher) FSK.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) - Sensors Directorate Blue Guardian program researches, develops, and demonstrates rapid sensor integration technologies. This includes integration technologies for not only the physical sensors, but also the software, communication, and processing elements. Blue Guardian’s approach is to leverage existing baseline open architectures and develop new open architecture and adaptable interface technologies. The resulting integration technology is called the Blue Guardian Open Adaptable Architecture (OA2) and enables development and demonstration of new Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities with reductions in cost, schedule, and integration time. Blue Guardian has grown from a flight test focused program to taking the lessons learned of the difficulties in sensor integration and developing OA2 software and hardware technologies to improve the efficiency and speed of sensor integration. Over the past year, Blue Guardian has teamed with the AFRL Manufacturing and Materials Directorate to integrate OA2 into the AFRL AgilePod. This paper discusses the background for these research efforts, development approach and technical details, highlights OA2, discusses recent test events, and future areas to improve OA2 to improve United States Air Force capabilities!

Not needed per email from Raja Suresh

In this paper we focus on meeting requirements of the rapid decision cycle of tactical command and control. We explore the security requirements of secure enclaves, and how Named Data Networking (NDN) can satisfy those needs. We show how the use of NDN to provide authenticated command and control can prevent spoofing of commands and forged telemetry. We utilize NDN to provide confidentiality of data within the secure network, while providing non overlapping secure enclaves in different tactical environments. We show NDN’s caching and store and forward capabilities to improve data delivery in the presence of loss on a tactical on the move network. We find NDN has many useful capabilities which lend themselves to command and control communications systems.

Cooperative, multi-agent approaches for a wide range of applications is becoming increasingly common and necessary. In many military and industry applications it is no longer desirable to rely on a small number of very capable, but expensive systems; today a larger emphasis is being placed on the use of a large number of inexpensive and individually inferior systems. The assumption, and the topic of a wide array or recent research, is that through appropriate cooperation, the cumulative capabilities of the networked system equals or surpasses those of the “gold-plated” system, yet will be more robust (as an overall system) and less expensive. This paper focuses on a small but important subset of the cooperative systems architecture, namely the relative pose estimation problem. An accurate understanding of relative pose can be a key enabler for a wide range of cooperative applications, this paper discusses some possible approaches and associated uses for an accurate understanding of relative pose while emphasizing scalability, tractable communications, and robustness to large initial uncertainties.

Mission objectives for cyber systems operating in a tactical or deployed operational environment must address not only security but also resilience. A cyber resilient architecture is engineered for completing mission objectives in the “face of persistent, stealthy, and sophisticated attacks of cyber resources (MITRE, 2011)”. Ever evolving adversaries drive the need for system architectures to protect cyber resources but enable operations during an attack to achieve mission objectives. Similar to cyber security, resilience must be engineered into all layers of system architecture at inception, baking protections for security and redundancies for resilience through all layers of the system architecture.

Today, drone technology has been made available around the world. Anyone can purchase a drone from an online retailer. Government agencies and military are seeing a rise in drones used for terrorism, destruction and espionage. The emergence of threats caused by unfriendly or hostile drones requires proactive drone detection in order to decide on appropriate defensive actions. In this contribution, a high-level data fusion component for drone classification is presented. The high-level data fusion component is part of our counter UAV system MODEAS including decision support. The component provides well-defined interfaces which allow it to be integrated also into other counter UAV systems. The aim of the high-level data fusion component is to support an operator in his decision making by providing detailed information about detected drones together with assigned threat levels. To identify a detected and tracked drone with sufficient detail, a knowledge-based classification is performed, based on background knowledge like drone model specifications. By fusing the knowledge-based classification results with prior results of a sensor-based classification, the overall classification is improved. The fusion results, in addition to kinematic data, also contain specific capabilities of the respective drone like its maximum payload, endurance, and speed as well as recorded incidents with similar drones or their typical (commercial) usage, if known. Based on these fusion results, a threat analysis is performed. The component’s output then is a ranked list of dossiers for the most probable types of drones with regard to the observation data and their assigned threat levels.

We present a forward error correction (FEC)-assisted, 10 km long, 28 Gbaud PAM4 optical link having error free performance over a wide dynamic range of -10 dBm to 0 dBm received optical power. The link was formed by driving a 1550 nm externally modulated laser with a commercial PAM4 transceiver chip. The optical signal was transmitted over 10 km long dispersion compensated fiber, fed to a low-noise 28 GHz linear receiver having variable gain, and routed back to the PAM4 transceiver chip. Real time bit error rate measurements demonstrate the advantage of employing linear receivers having automatic gain control (AGC).

Mobile node networks are wireless networks formed by different types of devices (sensors, actuators, drones, servers, etc.) that collect, disseminate, process and store information about the environment. This type of networks allows the development of applications in different fields such as medicine, environmental protection, public transport, industrial control, militia, among others. The processing of information acquired by this type of networks is a complex task mainly for 3 reasons: the heterogeneity of the devices that make up the network, the massive amount of information that can be acquired and stored, and the size of the problem or phenomenon to be studied. Due to these difficulties, different tools and approaches have been developed and proposed to perform the processing, analysis, integration and management of information in mobile node networks (data mining, use of middleware, statistical models, Machine learning, Statistical learning, Deep learning, mobile agents, to mention a few). This paper proposes a model applicable to mobile node networks that allows generating knowledge from the variables acquired from the medium. This model is based on the use of ontologies to identify the components of the networks, the relationship between them and the situation under which they work, to subsequently analyze and process information through a statistical model that provides knowledge according to the context, but also allows to infer and predict behaviors and actions in the phenomenon studied.

A collaborative robotic team may need to allocate multiple tasks within an unknown and highly dynamic environment. Highly dynamic environments entail constantly changing states of its entities, objects, and situational characteristics. Tasks in dynamic environments can have unknown information, changing requirements, and can result in unforeseen goal states. (e.g., searching an unfamiliar building can result in an unknown number of rooms, or open areas to be further searched). Essentially, the task requirements can change, the asset/robot ability to perform the task can change, and the environment can change such that an allocation of tasks may need to be re-allocated. The allocation process must be flexible enough and ad-hoc in nature to compensate for such dynamics. This report presents the results of multiple investigations into various market-based, ad-hoc methods as a means to flexibly allocate tasks across a mobile robotic team in unknown and highly dynamic environments. These ad-hoc methods can be controlled from a centralized point or implemented in a decentralized mode. The decentralized control is of greater interest since it reduces processing bottlenecks, eliminates single points of failures, and can encourage network dataflow that is more natural to the ad-hoc nature of the mobile team of robotic vehicles. This is especially true when the number of tasks and robots are scaled up (i.e., swarm robotics). The approach utilizes weighted formulas that represent a robot’s ability to engage each of the identified tasks, and a task’s allocation is based on comparing the results of these weighted formulae. The allocation process is improved via optimizing the formulas’ weights based on deep-learning methods.

Conference Presentation for "Advances in autonomous underwater vehicles and the move to network centric persistent subsea capabilities"

We present a swarm of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) capable of persistent surveillance as well as engagement of the hostile targets identified on the ground. That is, for a given area of interest, that might be hostile, we design a capability of monitoring ground targets by the swarm of autonomous armed UAVs in persistent way that will be capable of engaging these targets if necessary. The UAVs decide by themselves when and how to come back to the maintenance site(s) in order to be recharged of refueled. A single Operating Control Unit (OCU) is sufficient to integrate with such a swarm of UAVs. Its role is mainly focused on sending high level commands, some of which might overwrite the UAVs autonomous intention. For example, a commander might request through OCU engagement of target(s), look for specific target(s), or immediate return of some UAVs to the maintenance sites. Since UAVs are autonomous then the communication links from OCU to UAVs do not need to be continuously maintained.

We propose a secure communication system using interleaved ergodic chaotic parameter modulation. The method is implemented on software defined radios. We show that even if the interceptor knows the interleaving pattern and has a close guess of the spreading gain, the bit error rate (BER) could be still as high as 0.466 because the bits are misaligned. We further combine the ECPM with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). The OFDM mechanism provides another layer of protection for the information. Our experiments show that the interceptor may have a BER as high as 0.463 even if he correctly guessed 184 out of the 192 subcarriers occupation.