Matthew Gillen

Raytheon BBN Technologies | BBN

To make appropriate, timely decisions in the field, Situational Awareness (SA) needs to be conveyed in a decentralized manner to the users at the edge of the network as well as at operations centers. Sharing real-time SA efficiently between command centers and operational troops poses many challenges, including handling heterogeneous and dynamic ne...

The effectiveness of ground-based, wireless tactical data networks is often constrained by limitations such as communication range and line-of-sight. SATCOM is not always available because it is relatively expensive and highly contended. Data ferrying is an alternative method of data transfer in which data is uploaded from one network to a manned o...

In today's world, connectivity is increasingly taken for granted. Wireless networks, cell towers, and satellites provide ubiquitous connectivity through a number of devices. However, in austere locations constant connectivity cannot be assumed, e.g., due to the remoteness of the area, due to a disaster or combat situation, or due to insecurity or l...

Force protection capabilities have emerged as necessary for operations such as Village Stability Operations and Forward Operating Base security. Current Force Protection Kits include a rich set of sensors that can be monitored from a core operator station. This paper describes ongoing research to extend the reach of Force Protection capabilities as...

We present a content network architecture for a cluster of satellites flying in low Earth orbit. The cluster uses a dynamic wireless network to interconnect the satellites and has an intermittent link to the ground. Even though a cluster of satellites fly in formation, their relative positions can vary widely, and occasionally the cluster can dispe...

Although IP and its overlying protocols, such as TCP and UDP, are ubiquitous, they were originally designed for point-to-point connections between computers in reasonably fixed locations. They are less suited to mobile networks and broadcast communications. In this paper, we present an alternative to IP that is based on a publish-subscribe approach...

Disadvantaged wireless communications, such as those in fractionated spacecraft systems, need real-time, reliable, and fault tolerant information dissemination from information producers (such as sensors) to information consumers (such as information exploitation, analysis, or command and control systems). Such systems are well-suited to the publis...

SUMMARYSOA middleware has emerged as a powerful and popular distributed computing paradigm because of its high-level abstractions for composing systems and encapsulating platform-level details and complexities. Control of some details encapsulated by SOA middleware is necessary, however, to provide managed QoS for SOA systems that require predictab...

Publish-subscribe-based Information Management (IM) services provide a key enabling technology for net-centric operations. This paper describes technology for Quality of Service (QoS) and Internet-Protocol-based Airborne Networking features for IM services. Enhancing IM services with airborne networking features improves effectiveness in combined t...

SOA middleware has emerged as a powerful and popular distributed computing paradigm because of its high-level abstractions for composing systems and encapsulating platform-level details and complexities. Control of some details encapsulated by SOA middleware is necessary, however, to provide managed QoS for SOA systems that require predictable perf...

Wireless networking is moving toward the adoption of IP protocols and away from the multitude of special-purpose tac- tical radios traditionally in the hands of emergency personnel, mili- tary personnel, and law enforcement. The adoption of standards, such as IP multicast, has facilitated this. IP multicast also enables recovering some of the advan...

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) middleware has emerged as a powerful and popular distributed computing paradigm due to its high-level abstractions for composing systems and hiding platform-level details. Control of some details hidden by SOA middleware is necessary, however, to provide managed quality of service (QoS) for SOA systems that need...

Warfighters in today's asymmetric engagements need access to mission-critical information no matter when and where it becomes available. Information Management Services (IMSs) based on publish-subscribe-query services have emerged as an important enabler of tactical information dominance in combined tactical and enterprise military situations. IMSs...

Modern warfare relies on dynamic, coalition operations supported by small, agile teams in time sensitive missions. While each member of a coalition may maintain a local information space supporting the activities of its own teams, coalition members must be able to share information to cooperate effectively in dynamic environments and succeed in the...

Information spaces have emerged as a powerful concept for providing managed exchange of information between members of communities of interest (COIs), including information brokering and dissemination by publish-subscribe- query middleware. To support COIs with real-time or critical information exchange requirements, information spaces require qual...

Under the DynRIIC project, we produced results in two primary areas of QoS management for information spaces: architecture and algorithms. In the architecture area, we conceived, designed, and prototyped a multi-layered QoS management architecture suitable for information spaces. The multi-layered QoS management system works alongside the informati...

This paper presents a scalable, adaptive and timebounded general approach to assure reliable, real-time Node-Failure Detection (NFD) for large-scale, high load networks comprised of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and software. Nodes in the network are independent processors which may unpredictably fail either temporarily or permanently. W...

Fault tolerance (FT) is a crucial design consideration for mission-critical distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems, which combine the real-time characteristics of embedded platforms with the dynamic characteristics of distributed platforms. Traditional FT approaches do not address features that are common in DRE systems, such as scale, he...

Effective network-centric warfare requires information exchange with suitable quality of service (QoS) to meet the warfighter's needs. Information delivered too late or with the wrong resolution, form, or precision is insufficient for the user to perform his role in a warfighting scenario. Key characteristics of network-centric warfare environments...

Dynamic resource management is a crucial part of the infrastructure for emerging distributed real-time embedded systems, responsible for keeping mission-critical applications operating and allocating the resources necessary for them to meet their requirements. Because of this, the resource manager must be fault-tolerant, with nearly continuous oper...

Maintaining end-to-end quality of service (QoS) is a challenge in distributed real time embedded systems due to dynamically changing network environments and resource requirements. The authors' middleware QoS management approach encapsulates QoS behaviors as software components. Using the Corba component model, they build these specialized QoS comp...

Dynamic resource management is a crucial part of the infrastructure for emerging mission-critical distributed real-time embedded system. Because of this, the resource manager must be fault-tolerant, with nearly continuous operation. This paper describes an ongoing effort to develop a fault-tolerant multi-layer dynamic resource management capability...

Many of the world's most critical systems are distrib- uted real-time embedded (DRE) systems, with mission- critical quality of service (QoS) requirements. However, because of their nature - heterogeneous nodes and links, shared and constrained resources, and deployment in dy- namic environments - providing QoS requires coordi- nated QoS management...

This paper describes the Quality-based Adaptive Resource Management Architecture, QARMA, a framework for resource management within CORBA. QARMA consists of three major components: the System Repository Service, the Resource Management Service, and the Enactor Service. QARMA serves as a basis for integration of existing CORBA services and managemen...

For computer vision systems to operate in many real-world environments, processing must occur in real-time under dynamic conditions. An agent-based methodology offers an approach to increase flexibility and scalability to accommodate the demands of a real-time, dynamic environment. This paper presents an agent-based architecture that uses a utility...

The advent of inexpensive computers has spurred interest in distributed architectures, in which a cluster of low-cost corn- peters can achieve performance on the same scale as expen- sive super-computers. The goal of research in distributed sys- tems is to take a highly decomposable problem solution, and put that solution into a framework that allo...

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This paper describes a test-bed for technology that unifies agent based computing and adaptive resource management for dynamic real-time systems. We describe a unified framework that combines a hybrid agent based architecture with explicit resource adapting mechanisms.

Agent based computing offers the ability to decentralize computing solutions by incorporating autonomy and intelligence into cooperating, distributed applications. It provides an effective medium for expressing solutions to problems that involve interaction with real-world environments and allows modelling of the world state and its dynamics. This...

This paper describes an architecture (3D-VDBM) for distributed three-dimensional visualization and debugging of distributed agents. This architecture is demonstrated through application to the problem of debugging a collection of intelligent agents that play soccer in a simulated environment for the RoboCup international competition.

Maintaining end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) in distributed applications operating within dynamically changing environments is challenging. We have been devel-oping a middleware QoS management approach based upon composing QoS Components. In this paper, we illustrate and evaluate the approach using a real world medium-scale ex-ample we've built....

This paper presents three case-based reasoning (CBR) prototypes developed for the RoboCats, a team of five soccer playing robots in the RoboCup small size league. CBR is used to help the Robo-Cats plan individual moves and team strategies, as well as to model the world of the playing field. More specifically, the case-based reasoners posi-tion the...