This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 7350, including the Title Page, Copyright information, table of Contents, Introduction (if any), and the Conference Committee listing.

Unmanned systems are often used to augment the ability of humans to perform challenging tasks. While the value of individual unmanned vehicles has been proven for a variety of tasks, it is less understood how multiple unmanned systems should be used together to accomplish larger missions such as site security. The purpose of this paper is to discuss efforts by researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to explore the utility and practicality of operating multiple unmanned systems for a site security mission. This paper reviews the technology developed for a multi-agent mission and summarizes the lessons-learned from a technology demonstration.

This paper is a discussion of six net-centric enabling concepts. This paper explores the considerations that include the human, machine/system, and temporal solutions, which are encapsulated in the enabling technology concepts of simplicity, standardization, dynamic network management, self-synchronization, temporal decisions, and human in system designs. Simply put, net-centric solutions are not only network issues, but should include system application and human interface considerations. This presentation will discuss each of the six enabling concepts and how they add value to a net-centric system and interoperability.

Today's enterprise networks undergo a relentless barrage of attacks from foreign and domestic adversaries. These attacks may be perpetrated with little to no funding, but may wreck incalculable damage upon the enterprises security, network infrastructure, and services. As more services come online, systems that were once in isolation now provide information that may be combined dynamically with information from other systems to create new meaning on the fly. Security issues are compounded by the potential to aggregate individual pieces of information and infer knowledge at a higher classification than any of its constituent parts. To help alleviate these challenges, in this paper we introduce the notion of semantic policy and discuss how it's use is evolving from a robust approach to access control to preempting and combating attacks in the cyber domain, The introduction of semantic policy and adversarial modeling to network security aims to ask 'where is the network most vulnerable', 'how is the network being attacked', and 'why is the network being attacked'. The first aspect of our approach is integration of semantic policy into enterprise security to augment traditional network security with an overall awareness of policy access and violations. This awareness allows the semantic policy to look at the big picture - analyzing trends and identifying critical relations in system wide data access. The second aspect of our approach is to couple adversarial modeling with semantic policy to move beyond reactive security measures and into a proactive identification of system weaknesses and areas of vulnerability. By utilizing Bayesian-based methodologies, the enterprise wide meaning of data and semantic policy is applied to probability and high-level risk identification. This risk identification will help mitigate potential harm to enterprise networks by enabling resources to proactively isolate, lock-down, and secure systems that are most vulnerable.

Airborne networks are envisioned to provide interconnectivity for terrestial and space networks by interconnecting highly mobile airborne platforms. A number of military applications are expected to be used by the operator, and all these applications require proper routing security support to establish correct route between communicating platforms in a timely manner. As airborne networks somewhat different from traditional wired and wireless networks (e.g., Internet, LAN, WLAN, MANET, etc), security aspects valid in these networks are not fully applicable to airborne networks. Designing an efficient security scheme to protect airborne networks is confronted with new requirements. In this paper, we first identify a candidate routing architecture, which works as an underlying structure for our proposed security scheme. And then we investigate the vulnerabilities and attack models against routing protocols in airborne networks. Based on these studies, we propose an integrated security solution to address routing security issues in airborne networks.

Experiments were carried out at naval base Eckernförde, Germany, bringing together several projects concerning Defense Against Terrorism (DAT) and the net-centric battlespace. An integrated network of various Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems was realized to evaluate the benefit of net-centric operations, i. e. in DAT focusing on force protection. ISR systems of the German Army, Air force, and Navy as well as a number of not yet operational systems were integrated in a joint network. Information relationships, data models, collaborative system functions and services were defined for as much as 27 systems from 20 companies. The NATO ISR Interoperability Architecture (NIIA) as the corner stone of technical standards for interoperable ISR products like images and motion imagery was used to the extent possible. Services and systems adopted by the multinational project MAJIIC were the starting point to develop appropriate collaboration tools and mechanisms.

As DoD moves towards an Enterprise approach to IT, CIOs have been lauding SOA as the solution. It is clear that SOA addresses many challenges that face the DoD from information sharing to the fiscal issues of maintaining an IT infrastructure. As SOA is applied to more complex tasks and as we move IT out to the tactical edge there is an increased need to ensure access to the right information, in the right place at the right time. This paper explores the various methodologies of data services that are making SOA an accessible reality DoD.

The current approach of enabling real-time information sharing between the warfighters, homeland protectors and allied/coalition forces is done mainly via custom solutions. There is a need for new standards that allow a common service to provide automated processes to check and cleanse data and convert it to interoperable format before sending it to the next domain. There is also a need to ensure that there is sufficient security for data and authenticate the source and confidence in the contents. This paper investigates the requirements and architectures for the Enterprise Cross Domain Solutions and presents the current needs, technologies and gaps.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the requisite technologies and enabling capabilities for network-centric sensor data analysis within the mine warfare community. The focus includes both automated processing and the traditional humancentric post-mission analysis (PMA) of tactical and environmental sensor data. This is motivated by first examining the high-level network-centric guidance and noting the breakdown in the process of distilling actionable requirements from this guidance. Examples are provided that illustrate the intuitive and substantial capability improvement resulting from processing sensor data jointly in a network-centric fashion. Several candidate technologies are introduced including the ability to fully process multi-sensor data given only partial overlap in sensor coverage and the ability to incorporate target identification information in stride. Finally the critical enabling capabilities are outlined including open architecture, open business, and a concept of operations. This ability to process multi-sensor data in a network-centric fashion is a core enabler of the Navy's vision and will become a necessity with the increasing number of manned and unmanned sensor systems and the requirement for their simultaneous use.

The combinatorial nature of sensor placement optimization has motivated the use of heuristic algorithms to avoid the high computational costs of finding global optima by focusing instead on satisfactory local optima. Transition of an optimization strategy from research to practice should involve a detailed inquiry into the dependence of its results on the representation of realistic scenarios. A sampling method was used to examine how the specification of a sensor placement problem for optimization affects the statistical properties of various ensembles of optimum networks produced by a heuristic algorithm. Features sampled in each ensemble were the resolution of the grid used for computing network coverage, the range of each sensor, and the dimensions of obstacles to line-of-sight sensing. The candidate placement grid also was sampled to examine the consequences of being unable to place sensors at a subset of a regularly spaced grid. The objective function was the number of sensors required to exceed a probability of detection threshold throughout the coverage area. The relative importance of variability in each parameter was found to depend on the widths and baseline values of the assumed variability ranges. Important length scale ratios were identified for ensuring the feasibility and integrity of the optimization process.

WISER is a scalable network emulation tool for networks with several hundred heterogeneous wireless nodes. It provides high-fidelity network modeling, exchanges packets in real-time, and faithfully captures the complex interactions among network entities. WISER runs on inexpensive COTS platforms and represents multiple full network stacks, one for each individual virtual node. It supports a flexible open source router platform (XORP) to implement routing protocol stacks. WISER offers wireless MAC emulation capabilities for different types of links, waveforms, radio devices, etc. We present experiments to demonstrate WISER's capabilities enabling a new paradigm for performance evaluation of mobile sensor and ad-hoc networks.

As the list of anti-air warfare and ballistic missile defense missions grows, there is an increasing need to coordinate and optimize usage of radar resources across the netted force. Early attempts at this optimization involved top-down control mechanisms whereby sensors accept resource tasking orders from networked tracking elements. These approaches rely heavily on uncertain knowledge of sensor constraints and capabilities. Furthermore, advanced sensor systems may support self-defense missions of the host platform and are therefore unable to relinquish control to an external function. To surmount these issues, the use of bottom-up emergent control techniques is proposed. The information necessary to make quality, network-wide resource allocations is readily available to sensor nodes with access to a netted track picture. By assessing resource priorities relative to the network (versus local) track picture, sensors can understand the contribution of their resources to the netted force. This allows the sensors to apply resources where most needed and remove waste. Furthermore, simple local rules for resource usage, when properly constructed, allow sensors to obtain a globally optimal resource allocation without direct coordination (emergence). These results are robust to partial implementation (i.e., not all nodes upgraded at once) and failures on individual nodes (whether from casualty or reallocation to other sensor missions), and they leave resource control decisions in the hands of the sensor systems instead of an external function. This paper presents independent research and development work on emergent control of sensor resources and the impact to resource allocation and tracking performance.

Modeling Situation awareness (SA) in NCO/NCW environments is inherently challenging due to the complexity of the underlying network, highly dynamic nature of processes, and the need for real time analysis. In this paper, we present a performance model for SA using the Network Centric Operations Performance & Prediction (NCO-PP) framework, an established framework for analyzing and predicting performance of NCO/NCW networks. In this paper, we continue to formulate a realistic model that represents dynamism in both the information and network spaces and also their effects on each other. We validate our model via simulations that compare the performance of SA under various information sharing and filtering paradigms. We provide and define a number of relevant performance metrics for SA and show with experimental results that modeling the dynamism in the network lead to superior SA. We also show that the performance of the SA can be significantly improved with proactive resource allocation that takes into account the real time predictions of the future states of the network and the environment.

In Net-centric operations the timely flow of the correct information to the mission partners is fundamental for the success of the endeavor. Yet, as we strive to work in multi-agencies and multi-national coalitions it is important to control the flow of information. This is the information assurance net-centric dilemma. How to speed the flow of information while keeping the necessary access boundaries? Current multi-level security and role base access strategies and their derivatives control the flow of data, but fail to implement higher levels of information policy. We propose an architecture capable of supporting the solution of the Net-Centric dilemma. This architecture, distributed and scalable, is compatible with Air Force's Metadata Environment initiative (MDE). In the proposed architecture the metadata tagged data items are used to construct a semantic map of how the information items are associated. Using this map, policy can be applied to information items. Provided the policy is logically based, reasoners can be used to identify not only if the person soliciting the data item has rights to receive it but also what kind of information can be derived from this data based on information retrieved previously. The full architecture includes the determination of which information can be relayed or not at any given time, as well as all the required mechanisms for enforcement including identification of potential intentional fraudulent actions. The proposed architecture is extensible and does not require any specific policy language or reasoner to be effective. Multiple approaches can be simultaneously present in the system.

The Knowledge Management Framework (KMF) of the US Air Force 45th Space Wing's Knowledge Management Initiative (KMI) is a semantic service-oriented architecture that provides Eastern Range stakeholders with a semantically unified, web-based view of distributed range information-a Single Integrated Range Picture-through a virtual, federated, ontology-based enterprise model. Design time activities include the creation of physical data services and mapping of those physical data services to logical data services corresponding to the concepts described in an OWLDL[ 1] ontology. The physical data services aggregate and normalize information stored within federated relational databases and XML[2] files. Runtime activities are managed through a single web service providing methods for ontology discovery, ontology inspection and retrieval of concept instances from federated data sources. We present lessons learned and the technology currently under development to support ontology-driven EII, reasoning, and search. We finish by discussing how these lessons have reshaped our thinking about the role of semantics in enriching information to make it more meaningful for stakeholders, and the impact of these new concepts on our evolving KMF architecture.

Net-centric information spaces have become a necessary concept to support information exchange for tactical warfighting missions using a publish-subscribe-query paradigm. To support dynamic, mission-critical and time-critical operations, information spaces require quality of service (QoS)-enabled dissemination (QED) of information. This paper describes the results of research we are conducting to provide QED information exchange in tactical environments. We have developed a prototype QoS-enabled publish-subscribe-query information broker that provides timely delivery of information needed by tactical warfighters in mobile scenarios with time-critical emergent targets. This broker enables tailoring and prioritizing of information based on mission needs and responds rapidly to priority shifts and unfolding situations. This paper describes the QED architecture, prototype implementation, testing infrastructure, and empirical evaluations we have conducted based on our prototype.

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. Enabling information management in these highly dynamic environments will require multiple support services and protocols which are affected by, and highly dependent on, the underlying capabilities and dynamics of the tactical network infrastructure. In this paper we investigate, discuss, and evaluate the effects of realistic tactical and mobile communications network environments on mission-critical information management systems. We motivate our discussion by introducing the Advanced Information Management System (AIMS) which is targeted for deployment in tactical sensor systems. We present some operational requirements for AIMS and highlight how critical IM support services such as discovery, transport, federation, and Quality of Service (QoS) management are necessary to meet these requirements. Our goal is to provide a qualitative analysis of the impact of underlying assumptions of availability and performance of some of the critical services supporting tactical information management. We will also propose and describe a number of technologies and capabilities that have been developed to address these challenges, providing alternative approaches for transport, service discovery, and federation services for tactical networks.

This paper will discuss and evaluate the advantages provided by the DEBON-Air simulation environment for effecting communications between UAV airframes in flight. DEBON-Air provides a realistic multi-vehicle simulation environment which models communications complexities. By simulating various operational factors (e.g., bandwidth and reliability), and environmental factors (e.g., weather, altitude, range, and attitude), evaluators can establish the functional and performance characteristics of an Information Management System (IMS) in a simulated tactical environment. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Apollo IMS will be used in concert with the DEBON-Air simulation environment for the purposes of these evaluations.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has developed a reference set of Information Management (IM) Services that will provide an essential piece of the envisioned final Net-Centric IM solution for the Department of Defense (DoD). These IM Services will provide mission critical functionality to enable seamless interoperability between existing and future DoD systems and services while maintaining a highly available IM capability across the wide spectrum of differing scalability and performance requirements. AFRL designed this set of IM Services for integration with other DoD and commercial SOA environments. The services developed will provide capabilities for information submission, information brokering and discovery, repository, query, type management, dissemination, session management, authorization, service brokering and event notification. In addition, the IM services support common information models that facilitate the management and dissemination of information consistent with client needs and established policy. The services support flexible and extensible definitions of session, service, and channel contexts that enable the application of Quality of Service (QoS) and security policies at many levels within the SOA.