This website is preserved for historical and scholarly reference and is no longer actively maintained.

last update:  9/2/2022   TBD:  need to update/2020


Low Latency Networking -  Literature survey  and modeling assumption highlights


Topic 1   Propagation and fading models for ns3

Wireless signals are subject to multiple forms of impairment as the RF energy propagates from a transmitter to a receiver.


Topic 2:   High level summary of the DOD's direction for future battlefields

Future DoD systems will likely reflect Information Centric Networking concepts. Much of the literature assumes this implies forms of NDN.  There seems to be a desire to use SDN.  Much of the original enthusiasm for SDN in academic communities has diminished  (who wants to spend a year of a student's time dealing with lousy SDN open source code).   In the real-world,  SDN was of interest only because it potentially provided a standard configuration and monitoring interface - however that interest seems to have peaked.  The DoD community is likely more interested in future battlefields that have a separate data and control plane - which can be met through spectrum management or standard wireless 'slicing' methods. 

IOBT:  The Internet of Battle Things (IOBT) reflects the possible adoption by the DoD of evolving Internet concepts such as the Internet of Things,  Edge computing to support a battlefield that in one dimension is a complex system of machines and sensing devices that integrate forming a cohesive distributed computing environment.


SDN-DTN

NDN-Tactical

CurrentStateOfMulticastRouting



Topic 3:   High level summary of ICN concepts 


ONTOLOGIES
 Military Ontologies for Information Dissemination at the Tactical Edge and other similar papers describe the DoD's equivalent direction to the Internet's quest for The Semantic Web [ ].  Core to ICN is the choice of data and how it is represented.  The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) provided techniques to tag data and to identify more complex associations of particular data along with an underlying ontology that ties identifiers into a common language are the basic components required.

Survey-ICN , RECENT-ICN:   Various ideas for a data oriented Internet began to appear in the literature beginning in 1999.  In 2007 the NSF began funding research specifically focusing on ICN.  One approach that was widely studied was Named Data Networking (NDN) [NDN, NDN-Brief-Intro].  NDN is a request driven architecture where receivers express interest in particular data to NDN routers.  The interest message contains information as to the source (producer) of the data allowing NDN routers to forward Internets to producer nodes. NDN routers note who is interested in particular data storing enough information and collectively sufficient information within the Internet so that when the producer creates a data message that matches a consumer's interest, the message is forwarded through the Internet through the path of NDN routers with each router ensuring the data is distributed to all consumers that have expressed interest.  The technique is equivalent to the Internet's current unicast and multicast communications methods.  NDN is clearly Internet-oriented and is appropriate for large messages (or perhaps streams of data) that are to persist within the Internet for long time periods. Caching of data at NDN routers promote scalability.  

PUBSUB
Closely tied to ICN is the distributed communications method referred to as publish-subscribe (or pubsub).  As the use of synchronous-oriented RPC was found to have scalability issues in distributed systems, the concept of asynchronous message oriented middleware (MOM) was established and widely used. Fundamental to MOM systems is that messages are independent and contain all the necessary information to allow an appropriate system to deliver the message to one or more receivers.  MOM incorporates message queues with possible options for reliability and quality of service. 

A specific form of MOM was developed by IBM in 1999 known as MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT).  This was originally developed to create a lightweight bandwidth-efficient messaging protocol that was data agnostic with support for optional support for reliability and quality of service. Typically used in an asynchronous manner, clients that serve as data sources publish data to a centralized broker.  Clients that serve as receivers of data subscribe to data that they are interested in receiving  to a broker. Messages contain any number of topics (and subtopics) supporting the dissemination of very specific data or, with support of wildcards,  the dissemination of aggregated topics to interested subscribers. 


A DHT-based Infrastructure for Content-based Publish/subscribe Services
Publish/Subscribe Versus Content-based Approach for information Dissemination

Towards Efficient Publish-subscribe Middleware in the IoT with IPV6
DM-MQTT : And Efficient MQTT based on SDN Multicast for Massive IoT Communications
An SDN-MQTT Based Communication System for Battlefield UAV Swarms

Recent work by the research community has explored scalable pub-sub typically by leveraging geo information in the data
Location-Aware Pub/Sub System: When Continuous Moving Queries Meet Dynamic Event Streams
GeoBroker: Leveraging Geo-Contexts for IoT Data Distribution

Summary:  Much of the ICN work is simply applying NDN concepts. NDN and pub/sub was invented for the Internet.  NDN in particular is best suited for large data messages that persist for long time periods.  For example,  NDN could potentially work well for Internet streaming providers.  Pub/Sub is becoming the dominant method for disseminating IoT data.  However, NDN and pub/sub will likely not achieve the original goals until the Internet figures out a way to promote the sharing and reuse of data.  Recent work related to location aware pub/sub is somewhat relevant as it addresses how to deal with large streams of data disseminated to mobile consumers.

In a wireless context,  there are  There are a few papers that address the core issues of interest to us -  the blending of pub/sub with the challenges of highly mobile systems.  Location aware pub/sub can be re-looked at with the assumption that both the sender and receiver are mobile.   It seems that application systems that require highly functional, highly adaptive wireless systems continue to be limited by wireless issues.  Our direction for embellishing current adhoc wireless technologies with  1.  Separation control and data planes to all nodes; 2. Co-adaptation by application, middleware, infrastructure as the system performance evolves; 3. Blending pub/sub with traditional adhoc wireless to adapt the system on demand based on the data



Topic 4:   High level summary of modeling or studies of UAV/drone systems 

Divide and conquer....




Summary:   Research related to UAVs and Drones has been underway for 15 or more years.  Recent work includes collaborative drones performing tasks,  frameworks that provide platforms to simulate, emulate, or prototype experimental drone controllers or drone distributed applications.  As far as networking,  there is no clear direction.  Many systems utilize traditional adhoc systems using combinations of older and newer routing protocols. 

There are several papers that talk about the use of ICN or pub/sub in drone swarms.   This is likely an area that will attract more interest.


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