Raytheon BBN Technologies

Content-centricity enables efficient SA data dissemination

Soldiers in tactically volatile environments require access to increasingly large amounts of situational information to perform their missions. The need goes far beyond current blue-force tracking applications, but the support is lacking. Currently, data is preloaded during mission planning, so soldiers have to rely on good planning and hope that the mission doesn’t deviate from the plan (which never happens). As a mission deviates from the plan, soldiers require information they didn’t anticipate during the planning phase. Getting this new information means relying on slow, low bandwidth, and disrupted network links to reach back to upper echelons to retrieve new maps, spot reports, site plots or photos of high value targets. As the warfighter waits for the information request to be fulfilled, neighboring units are often asked to push the requested information to upper echelons without any means of simply sharing that information with the requesting neighboring unit. Soldiers need actionable information quicker.

BBN’s CASCADE project, under DARPA’s Content-Based Mobile Edge Networking program, provides a solution that maximizes information availability by bypassing the inefficiency of reach-back communications and exploiting novel content centric and cloud computing techniques to take advantage of common information needs.

CASCADE Impact

• Automatic routing and cache management to match content needs with content providers
• Novel use of communities and proactive caching to anticipate and enhance user’s experience
• Reduces traffic load on expensive reachback links
• Adapts to tactical MANET environment with severely disrupted links
• Network agnostic: CASCADE has a minimal set of MANET requirements for maximum flexibility in underlying infrastructure
• Provides a mediator gateway shim to adapt legacy applications into the CASCADE network
• Implemented on Android
• Leverages deep involvement in Programs of Record to aid in technology transition

Content-based networking (CBN) is a key ingredient. Instead of focusing on communications between nodes in a network, CBN considers only content— who has the content, and who it. This frees the soldier to make general or specific requests for information, and the CBN finds the relevant content that satisfies those requests. This is especially useful in two situations: taking advantage of newly created information and amortizing the cost of retrieving information when it is not locally present.

CASCADE extends the basic notion of the CBN by exploiting the phenomenon of communities. Communities are naturally formed by topological (physical) and interest (e.g., role, rank, or capability) partitions. CASCADE provides automatic community detection as the central tenet of determining participation. These communities act as leaderless groups that cooperate to dynamically cache content in a location and interest-efficient manner. CASCADE content distribution is closely tied to content naming and query generation based on clustering using commercially proven Resource Description Framework (RDF) technologies.

CASCADE also provides a model of user needs and interests to opportunistically cache content, leveraging soldiers’s preferences for certain classes of content, such as IED detonation devices in general, and particular pieces of content in different physical environments (RCIEDs in urban contexts or CWIEDs in rural contexts, for example). CASCADE tracks not only soldier’s interaction with content, but also the geo-location of where that content was accessed, informing a predictive algorithm that measures relevance to prioritize and manage the contents of the cache.

CASCADE makes the soldier’s situation better. With CASCADE, a dismounted warfighter equipped with smart devices such as Nett Warrior systems leverages tactical ad hoc networks, exploiting content-centric technologies to provide access to critical information in less time and with more relevance than is currently done today. Actionable information quicker means:

• A clearer understanding of the conditions of roads and buildings
• Deeper insight into the local populace, including images of potential hostiles
• Faster queries for the locations of various events, including small arms fire (SAF) and improvised explosive device (IED) attacks

Better information sooner allows the soldier to more efficiently and safely perform the mission in a very complex and dangerous environment.

This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific) under Contract No. N66001-12-C-4050. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) or SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific)

Approved for public release; distribution unlimited.
10.15.12