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Drone inexpensive and operational flexibility contributed to its exponential increase by civil users, apart from military applications. This resulted in posing threats due to drone misuses, such as smuggling, unlawful imaging and other significant vulnerability that makes its detection necessary. The study demonstrated a theoretical model of extracting the m-Doppler signature due to rotating blades of a quadcopter drone, in forward scattering radar (FSR) geometry. The model was further validated experimentally by using a parabolic dish antenna in the receiver system of the FSR geometry. Before these, some reported efforts made to detect the drone by using different methodologies such as acoustic, video, audio-visual, radio frequency, radar systems and other non-technical approaches like netting were briefly presented. The result of the authors’ investigation revealed that the drone could be detected from the signature generated due to rotating blades based on the blade orientation. This signature can further be used to identify the drone from other flying targets existing within the same surveillance area.

Passive radar (PR) systems are attractive for various military and commercial applications, where illuminators of opportunity are used. Using the fact that most target scenes are very sparsely populated makes it possible to apply compressive sensing (CS) for PR. CS provides higher resolution than that obtained by using traditional ambiguous function, but suffers from increasing coherence associated with the finer grids whether for monostatic radar or multistatic radar. A novel incoherent CS dictionary construction method is presented here to deal with the case of finer grids. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CS-based processing scheme with incoherent dictionary can work well for high-resolution PRs.

Biomaterials are evolving quite rapidly over the last decade. Many applications have been considered toward their involvement in saving lives in the line of duty for law enforcement agencies and military operations. This article discusses recent work on the role of biomaterials that can be considered as a competitive alternative to composites, being used against ballistic impacts. The fish-scaled biomaterials are focused on in this paper, highlighting their excellent mechanical properties and structural configurations. In its natural environment, the scale provides fishes with an armor plating, which is significantly effective in their survival against attacks of predator and the impact inflicted from sharp teeth. These bioinspired materials, if engineered properly, can provide an excellent alternative to current Kevlar® type armors, which are significantly heavier and can cause fatigue to the human body over long-term usage. The investigated materials can provide effective alternatives to heavier and expensive materials currently used in different industrial applications. Additionally, some recent development in the usage of fish scales as a biomaterial and its applications in rapid prototyping techniques are presented. Finally, this review provides useful information to researchers in developing and processing cost-effective biomaterials.

Drone networks are becoming increasingly popular in recent years and they are being used in many applications such as area coverage, delivery systems, military operations, etc. Area coverage is a broad family of applications where a group of connected drones collaboratively visit the whole or parts of an area to fulfill a specific objective and is widely being researched. Accordingly, different mobility models have been designed to define the rules of movements of the participating drones. However, most of them do not consider the network connectivity which is crucial, plus many models lack the priorities and optimization strategies that are important for drone networks. Therefore within this study, three known connectivity-aware mobility models have been analyzed comparatively. Two non-connectivity-aware mobility models have further been implemented to catch the placebo effect if any. Per the detailed experiments on the mobility models, coverage rates, connectivity levels, and message traffic have been evaluated. The study shows that the Distributed Pheromone Repel (DPR) model provides a decent coverage performance, while the Connectivity-based model and the Connected Coverage model provide better connectivity and communication quality. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

This paper advances the theoretical foundations and the methodology of spatial decision analysis in which multi-attribute consequences of decision alternatives vary over a spatial region. First, we introduce necessary and sufficient conditions for representing the decision maker’s preferences among such decision alternatives with an additive spatial value function. This new axiomatization allows for the representation of preferences when the spatial region consists of an infinite number of locations, which is often the case in practical applications. Moreover, we show that spatial value functions suggested in the existing literature can be interpreted as special cases of our additive spatial value function. Second, motivated by the high effort required to elicit preferences in spatial decision problems, we develop a method for utilizing the additive spatial value function with incomplete preference information about spatial weights describing the importance of locations and attribute weights. This method provides defensible decision recommendations through the use of dominance concepts and decision rules. The applicability of the developed value function and analysis method is illustrated with a real-life application in air defense planning.

The Anglova scenario was developed as part of the NATO IST-124 Research Task Group on Improving Connectivity and Network Efficiency in Heterogeneous Tactical Networks. Since then, it has been successfully used to conduct emulation-based experimentation by multiple groups. This paper describes extensions to the Anglova scenario for the purpose of experimentation within an Urban environment. In particular, the focus is on Vignette 3 and its extension for the new IST-168 Research Task Group on Adaptive Information Processing and Distribution for Command and Control. © 2019 IEEE.

The threat evaluation is significant component in target classification process and is significant in military and non military applications. Small errors or mistakes in threat evaluation and target classification especial in military applications can result in huge damage of life and property. Threat evaluation helps in case of weapon assignment, and intelligence sensor support system. It is very important factor to analyze the behavior of enemy tactics as well as our surveillance. This paper represented a precise description of the threat evaluation process using fuzzy sets theory. A review has been carried out regarding which parameters that have been suggested for threat value calculation. For the first time in this paper, eleven parameters are introduced for threat evaluation so that this parameters increase the accuracy in designed system. The implemented threat evaluation system has been applied to a synthetic air defense scenario and four real time dynamic air defense scenarios. The simulation results show the correctness, accuracy, reliability and minimum errors in designing of threat evaluation system

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2016.2518098 A major training device used to train all Landing Signal Officers (LSOs) for several decades has been the Landing Signal Officer Trainer, Device 2H111. This simulator, located in Oceana, VA, is contained within a two story tall room; it consists of several large screens and a physical rendition of the actual instruments used by LSOs in their operational environment. The young officers who serve in this specialty will typically encounter this system for only a short period of formal instruction (six one-hour long sessions), leaving multiple gaps in training. While experience with 2H111 is extremely valuable for all LSO officers, the amount of time they can spend using this training device is undeniably too short. The need to provide LSOs with an unlimited number of training opportunities unrestricted by location and time, married with recent advancements in commercial off the shelf (COTS) immersive technologies, provided an ideal platform to create a lightweight training solution that would fill those gaps and extend beyond the capabilities currently offered in the 2H111 simulator. This paper details our efforts on task analysis, surveying of user domain, mapping of 2H111 training capabilities to new prototype system to ensure its support of major training objectives of 2H111, design and development of prototype training system, and a feasibility study that included tests of technical system performance and informal testing with trainees at the LSO Schoolhouse. The results achieved in this effort indicate that the time for LSO training to make the leap to immersive VR has decidedly come.

Green perpetual sensor network operation is the need of the hour for critical applications, such as surveillance, military, and environment monitoring. Mobile integrated data collection and recharging is a promising approach to meet this requirement by routinely visiting the field nodes for collecting the sensed data and supplying energy via radio frequency (RF) energy transfer. Practical constraints, such as self-discharge and aging effects of the energy storage element (supercapacitor), significantly impact the renewable energy cycle (REC) and, hence, strongly influence the performance of RF energy harvesting networks. To account for the nonidealities in practical supercapacitors, in this paper, a circuit model for REC is proposed, and corresponding RF charging time and node lifetime expressions are derived. Hardware experiments are performed to validate the proposed REC model. REC for complicated supercapacitor models is characterized using duality principle and a generic simulation model. Using the developed analytical models for practical supercapacitors, the size of network for perpetual operation is estimated, which is demonstrated to be significantly less than that predicted by considering ideal supercapacitor behavior. For example, with three-branch supercapacitor model, the estimated sustainable network size is shown to be nearly 52% less than that offered by the ideal supercapacitor model. © 2013 IEEE.

The overall dynamic development of operational research in various fields of human activities urges the need for a clearer and mathematically more explicit classification of its methods. This need is also very urgent in the field of defense, particularly because of the complications of modern conflicts, as well as of new security requirements. One of the possible classifications of methods based on the theory of games as a mathematical model for solving conflict situations is presented in this paper. The connections between methods and their mathematical description are underlined.

Date of Conference: 6-11 July 2014 Conference name: 2014 USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting (Joint with AP-S Symposium) Slotted waveguide antennas are being widely used in military and commercial applications for many decades. Low cross-polarization, high power capacity, ease of fabrication in microwave bands, and the ability to form arrays make them excellent candidates for phased array antennas in radar applications. However, due to slots being highly resonant (narrow-band, high Q) radiators, their design parameters are very sensitive; hence, accurate design and analysis methods are required for a successful antenna design. Moreover, slotted waveguide array antennas are low-profile structures, which makes them suitable candidates for conformal and structure-integrated applications. Conformal and structure-integrated system solutions are especially required for air platforms, where aerodynamics, radar cross-section (RCS) and efficient use of real estate are of utmost importance. Although the accurate and efficient design and analysis of low-profile conformal slotted waveguide arrays are of great interest, available solution methods in the literature usually suffer in terms of efficiency and memory requirements. Among the available solution methods, one of the widely used solvers are integral equation (IE) based ones that utilize the method of moments (MoM). However, IE solvers suffer from long matrix fill times, especially for matrix entries related to the cylindrically stratified media. © 2014 IEEE.

Proposed and experimentally demonstrated is the CAOS-CMOS camera design that combines the coded access optical sensor (CAOS) imager platform with the CMOS multi-pixel optical sensor. The unique CAOS-CMOS camera engages the classic CMOS sensor light staring mode with the time-frequency-space agile pixel CAOS imager mode within one programmable optical unit to realize a high dynamic range imager for extreme light contrast conditions. The experimentally demonstrated CAOS-CMOS camera is built using a digital micromirror device, a silicon point-photo-detector with a variable gain amplifier, and a silicon CMOS sensor with a maximum rated 51.3 dB dynamic range. White light imaging of three different brightness simultaneously viewed targets, that is not possible by the CMOS sensor, is achieved by the CAOS-CMOS camera demonstrating an 82.06 dB dynamic range. Applications for the camera include industrial machine vision, welding, laser analysis, automotive, night vision, surveillance and multispectral military systems. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America

One of the great benefits VR systems offer is their ability to simulate a number of virtual humans when their presence is needed in the context of some learning or training experience. Being that the real humans may not be available to play different roles and support virtual sessions, the ability of a system to generate highly believable representations of autonomous virtual humans — virtual intelligent agents — is vital in achieving specific learning and training objectives. Eliminating the elements of the system that can cause a negative learning and training transfer is a paramount in those systems. We illustrate the results of two user studies focused on validation of non-deterministic domain-specific behaviors generated by our system (example: behaviors typical for a well coordinated group of paramedics or military unit). The results and observations confirmed that when it comes to VR systems with stringent requirements and high expectations for positive learning/training transfer, we still need humans to evaluate and validate synthesized human-like agent behaviors.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become a hot research topic in recent years and are considered to be one of the building blocks of pervasive computing. Many diverse, mission-critical applications are deployed, including military, rescue, healthcare, factory floor, and smart homes. Security is a fundamental requirement in such sensitive applications in order to ensure their reliable and stable operation. However, security is a fairly difficult task to achieve. The open nature of the wireless communication, the unrestricted deployment and limitations of WSNs and the existence of a variety of attacks threaten the security of a sensor network. Currently, research efforts have mainly focused on developing prevention and intrusion detection mechanisms in WSNs. Intrusion recovery is also an important aspect of security provisioning that is not given the same attention. Researchers have proposed intrusion recovery protocols to restore the network's operation when an attack is detected. Their designs are mostly based on simplified threat models, making the intrusion recovery countermeasures vulnerable to advanced threat models. Although the network may recover its operation after an attack is detected, it does not mean that the threat is eliminated. For example, a persistent adversary can adapt his intrusion strategy to compromise the deployed recovery countermeasure. This research work evaluates the robustness and reliability of well-known recovery countermeasures in WSNs against persistent adversaries. Evaluation results have shown that existing intrusion recovery solutions are vulnerable and can be exploited under different attack strategies in order to compromise the applied recovery countermeasures, and thus the network. The vulnerability assessment is carried out using ns-2 simulations in an IEEE 802.15.4 network and within the AODV context. Observations derived from the assessment contribute towards future directions that can drive new designs of intrusion recovery protocols in WSNs. © 2011 IEEE. 706 712 Sponsors: IEEE IEEE Computer Society IEEE Communications Society Conference code: 86395 Cited By :1

Security is an important property in applications offering services in mission-critical areas, such as in healthcare, military, transportation, etc. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) support the mission of these applications by monitoring the environment and reporting observations to appropriate authorities that are responsible for decision-making. Often, their operation can be at risk by adversaries that launch attacks against the WSN with the aim of compromising the reliability and availability of the network and the respective application. The outcome of an attack highly depends on the experience of the adversary and his capabilities in terms of programming skills, security knowledge and resources. From the network perspective, the challenge is to reliably recover to a normal operation as soon as the adversary is been detected and allow for packet delivery to destination. The challenge is even greater in the presence of adversaries that adapt their intrusion strategy to break the deployed recovery countermeasures and continue affecting the network. Proposed recovery countermeasures typically assume the use of omni-directional antennas, which cannot take advantage of antenna directivity in order to manipulate communication paths between WSN nodes for the purpose of (physically) bypassing an adversary. This paper presents an intrusion recovery protocol in WSNs that uses directional antennas to create controlled communication paths, thus routing, and enhancing the reliability, self-healingness and resilience of the network. The proposed protocol is implemented within the AODV context and evaluated using ns-2. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol to deliver packets to the destination in the presence of multiple persistent adversaries that deploy different types of simple to extended attacks. © 2011 IEEE. 433 438 Sponsors: IBM Cyprus University of Cyprus Cyprus Tourism Organisation Conference code: 85747 Cited By :3

Routing protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been substantially investigated by researches. Most state-of-the-art surveys have focused on reviewing the different routing schemes that have been proposed for WSN and classifying them based on the network's type and protocol's operation. Security aspects in routing protocols have not been given enough attention, since most of the routing protocols in WSNs have not been designed with security requirements in mind. However, taking into consideration that WSN applications need to support critical infrastructures (i.e., military, healthcare, environmental, etc.), security becomes an issue. And since these infrastructures are highly depended on the availability of resources, focus has especially been given to support a secure, resilient and reliable environment, with multipath routing being one of the added functionalities. The need for security in sensitive WSN application has lead researchers to design secure multipath routing protocols from the beginning or design security extensions for existing protocols. This paper surveys the current state-of-the-art of secure multipath routing protocols in WSNs, classifies the protocols in categories according to their security-related operational objectives, defines a new threat model in the routing procedure and identifies open research issues in the area. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 54 13 2215 2238 Cited By :75

Current military communication network is a generation old and is no longer effective in meeting the emerging requirements imposed by the future embedded military applications. Therefore, a new interconnection system is needed to overcome these limitations. Two new communication networks based upon Full Duplex Switched Ethernet are presented herein in this aim. The first one uses a distributed communication scheme where equipments can emit their data simultaneously, which clearly improves system’s throughput and flexibility. However, migrating all existing applications into a compliant form could be an expensive step. To avoid this process, the second proposal consists in keeping the current centralized communication scheme. Our objective is to assess and compare the real time guarantees that each proposal can offer. The paper includes the functional description of each proposed communication network and a military avionic application to highlight proposals ability to support the required time constrained communications.

Non-cooperative identification of unknown communication signals is a popular research area with widespread civilian and military applications. Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems employing multi-antenna transmission pose new challenges to signal identification systems, such as the classification of the employed space time block code (STBC) and modulation in the presence of the self-interference inherent to the multi-antenna transmission. In the existing literature, these two classification problems have been handled separately, despite the fact that they are interrelated. This letter presents a novel approach to MIMO signal identification by considering the modulation type and the STBC classification tasks as a joint classification problem. This work was supported by TUBITAK under Grant 112E020. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was R. C. de Lamare Publisher's Version

In 2006 it became clear for the Royal Netherlands Army (RNLA) that the traditional concept for exchanging data in the mobile domain, based upon hierarchical radio nets, could not offer sufficient performance for the future Battlefield Management System' (BMS). The C2 Support Centre, who develops the BMS, became aware of the insufficient performance through theoretical studies, lab experiments and field trials with currently used and various new radios. It also became clear that In the foreseeable future potential vendors of VHF radios could not offer radio's that provide the performance that was needed for the BMS system. These insights led to a concept where geographical related Information is exchanged to all vehicles in the immediate vicinity, Instead of through the traditional hierarchical way. The concept, which was named 'Geographical Based Situational Awareness ' (GBSA) aims to maximize the situational awareness In all vehicles in a geographical area without the need for communication up and down the hierarchical command chain). The benefits of this approach are increased timeliness of information and a significant reduction of the amount of information communicated along the hierarchical lines. The main operational benefit is a significantly improved support for fratricide prevention due to more timely position reports. As a first step in the development of the GBSA concept the C2 Support Centre choose to develop an abstract of the concept for Position Updates only. It was decided to run tests with 50 nodes as an average in the network and to continue with a simulation with up to an estimated maximum of 200 nodes. This paper discusses the recent development aspects that led to the GBSA concept. It furthermore describes the developed software, performed lab experiments, and the modelling and performance simulation of the mobile Position Update (PU) system. Simulation studies indicate that the GBSA-PU system is flexible enough to maintain an awareness of the position of vehicles in their local environment. The characteristics of the GBSA-PU system, its current and foreseen development as well as its relation to the hierarchical networks will also be presented. ©2007 IEEE.

Date of Conference: 9-12 December 2007 Conference Name: 2007 Winter Simulation Conference, WSC 2007 The Deployment Planning Problem (DPP) for military units may in general be defined as the problem of planning the movement of geographically dispersed military units from their home bases to their final destinations using different transportation assets and a multimodal transportation network while obeying the constraints of a time-phased force deployment data describing the movement requirements for troops and equipment. Our main contribution is to develop a GISbased, object-oriented, loosely-coupled, modular, platformindependent, multi-modal and medium-resolution discrete event simulation model to test the feasibility of deployment scenarios. While our simulation model is not a panacea for all, it allows creation and testing the feasibility of a given scenario under stochastic conditions and can provide insights into potential outcomes in a matter of a few hours.

This research effort presents a tabu search algorithm to solve the dynamic airlift loading problem. Given a set of palletized cargo items which require transportation from an aerial port of embarkation to an aerial port of debarkation within a pre-specified time frame, the dynamic airlift loading problem seeks to partition the pallets into aircraft loads, select an efficient and effective subset of aircraft from available aircraft, and assign the pallets to allowable positions on those aircraft. The dynamic airlift loading problem differs from many partitioning and packing problems described in the literature because, in addition to spatial constraints, factors such as allowable cabin load, balance restrictions, and temporal restrictions on cargo and aircraft are included. The algorithm developed in this research, the dynamic airlift loading problem-tabu search, was tested on a variety of problem instances. Since real-world solutions are hand generated by subject matter experts and no previous research effort has solved this specific problem, the algorithmic results are compared to compute lower bounds on the number of aircraft trips required.