Information-based Norms on Flow, Operations and Traffic Over Networks (INFOTON)

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects people, data, and "things" (e.g., software, sensors, platforms), facilitating the translation of information into actions. Although naval platforms’ networks and communication suites have evolved significantly in the past few years to support such required connectivity, one of the greatest technical challenges still facing the military community is the processing of huge amounts of information, determining what is important from it, and how to get it to the right person at the right time. The overall objective of the Information-based Norms on Flow, Operations and Traffic Over Networks (INFOTON) program is to build a prototype framework to model and analyze the dynamic communication network and information flow between set of agents (sensors, platforms, units) communicating over the IoT. The system will be applicable to the spectrum of communication and control paradigms (e.g., centralized, locally centralized, decentralized, etc.) and leverage military simulators to define realistic operational scenarios. INFOTON will help characterize the impact to measures of performance as a function of agents' processing of information, sparsity of reports given the conditions of the environment, available bandwidth, and the value of the information flow (communication volume) that is present in the IoT over time.