On the Fly Tasking, Configuration, and Control of IoT Networks

Agile Combat Employment (ACE) is one of the most vital force projection elements for the Air Force – ACE mission is lean, agile, and lethal force. ACE must go into a location, set up a base, do a forward area rearm, repair, and refuel and get back into the fight – doing so with minimal equipment and lean teams. ACE Forward Operating Sites (FOS) rely on small teams of Multi-functional Airmen (MFA) to support fighter jets, transport aircraft with aerospace group equipment (AGE), fueling systems, and portable C5ISR ground systems. From command and operational perspective, these ACE teams must have the ability to disperse, recover and rapidly resume operations in a contested or austere environment. From a technology perspective, these teams are under constant threat of cyberattacks, denial attacks, and unreliable communications. While deployed in this austere, challenged and contested environment, vigilance of incoming threats from an adversary is highly important and time critical. For these reasons, ACE teams require a capability to disperse a variety of sensing modules that can identify threats from adversary ISR activities (such as UAVs). A forward deployed sensor mesh will help detect cyber risks, tactical RF risks, environmental conditions, CBRN factors, movement in and around the areas, EW methods, and an enhanced multi-modal and multi-dimensional battlespace environment that will help IoBT swarming of humans, machines, sensors, and autonomous systems in surveillance/reconnaissance, deployment, and support missions.  However, once deployed either as ground sensors or autonomous UAVs, the ability to control these networks of IoT devices to increase sample frequency due to concern of imminent threats, enable inter-node cueing for increased sensitivity to a detected threat, have a network of devices establish a dynamic background level to enable subthreshold detection,  enable network self-optimization for various parameters such as greatest signal strength or low latency or maximal throughput, change security parameters of the entire network and/or eliminate a compromised node from the network, task the network to perform an analytics function, or other operations is vitally important without requiring the physical accessing of each deployed node. Our objective with this Phase I proposal is to undertake a Requirements Analysis to explore the needs, gaps, and requirements for on the fly configuration, tasking and control of wireless mesh networks, but also to develop these concepts and perform a preliminary demonstration of such capabilities.  A future Phase II proposal would then further develop technologies addressing these needs, along with test and evaluation in field conditions with ACE personnel, and develop these prototypes into products available for acquisition and use to improve the austere resiliency of wireless mesh sensor networks for ACE/SOF operations.