Secure networks for battlefield communications
Soldiers on the battlefield frequently need to communicate and share information with each other and mission commanders. Often, communications could be achieved with a cellphone, but security concerns preclude using existing 5G cellular networks.
Remi Chou, assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Arlington, is part of a team working to develop measures that would give U.S. military personnel a secure way to share critical information from the battlefield using the same high-performance consumer 5G networks that civilians do.
Chou will receive $220,000 as part of a $5 million National Science Foundation grant awarded to Taejoon Kim at the University of Kansas for the project. The rest of the team includes researchers from Iowa State University, Mississippi State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Wichita State University, Raytheon and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
The project looks at specific applications such as sharing intelligence, surveillance and recon data that is needed to establish a common operating picture among warfighters. The communications system must be able to detect threats in the environment such as eavesdropping, denial of service and injections of bad data and implement solutions to mitigate those threats to ensure that the network doesn’t reveal troop positions.
The team is looking at two approaches to threat mitigation: One is looking at hardening the core network and the other is a device-centric approach that can be deployed by installing software.
Chou is working on the device-centric solution. He will contribute to the development of a distributed antenna system to hide users’ locations and develop efficient algorithms to split communications through multiple network paths. This ensures that if one path is disrupted, military members can still use others to continue communication.
“The main objective is to develop something practical that can be rapidly deployed,” Chou said. “For most solutions, we want to make it oblivious to what the network does. By using split communications at the device level and accessing different base stations, the network doesn’t have to do anything. This approach will enhance both message availability and security in critical Department of Defense operations.”
The collaborative nature of this project and its importance to national security make it especially worthwhile, said Hong Jiang, chair of UTA’s Computer Science and Engineering Department and the Wendell H. Nedderman Endowed Professor.
“The ability to use existing 5G networks will enable our soldiers to be more connected and more agile on the battlefield, which will help them respond to threats more safely,” Jiang said. “We are happy that Dr. Chou can collaborate on this grant and lend his considerable expertise to this project.”
- Written by Jeremy Agor, College of Engineering