Integrated Edge Computing Leveraging EUDs in a Tactical Environment

The vision of Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) is where humans, machines, sensors, and autonomous systems will coordinate to execute missions, and do so in dynamic and sometimes ad hoc swarm configurations.  However, realizing such a vision is challenged in contested, degraded, or otherwise compromised A2/AD communications environments- even more concerning is that communication challenges are increasing as peer-nation electronic warfare technologies and radio denial technologies advance.  Thus, to be effective in this A2/AD paradigm, IoBT will need to integrate disparate sources of data and execute distributed processing, and execute these functions with no dependency on clouds, external connectivity, or client/server architectures.  As already seen in existing operations, peer-nations or austere conditions often can interfere, deny, or disrupt dismounted, deployed, and in-theater communications. Therefore, today’s dependencies on long-range connectivity, clouds and centralized computing are not practical for future missions and deployments.  To counter these challenges and drawbacks, prioritizing edge computing capabilities, decentralizing computational capabilities to avoid the need and reliance on highly-detectable uplinks, providing for distributed processing to eliminate any single point of failure, and empowering individuals in the field with data, analytics, and decision support in order to operate in such a disconnected environment will be critical to future mission success. Leveraging the computing power in the End-User Device (EUD) and providing the ability to swarm computing resources for higher-level processing would be much more powerful and also enable interactive decision support with the end-user where appropriate.  Such a model supports disconnected operations in denied/degraded environments, eliminates the requirement and bandwidth needed for highly detectable long-range communications, eliminates any single point of failure, and provides for local empowerment in disconnected operations.