The U.S. Army and Virginia Tech jointly conducted a study on network adaptability resulting in strategies that will enable continued operations amid component failures and cyber attacks.
The Army said Friday that Virginia Tech and the Army Research Laboratory developed a computational simulation with limited nodes, which may come from robots or cell phones. The nodes were assigned to tasks of varying priorities, including communication support, surveillance, search-and-rescue and distributed processing.
Terry Moore, an Army researcher, said the study sought to ensure that the Army's networks can "provide the services it needs."
"A key result of this work is showing that typical measures of performance for network resilience do not apply to mission-oriented or task-service networks," he said. "We mathematically prove that without consideration of the resources or task priority, network connectivity is not a sufficient measure for determining mission success."
The study, titled “Network Adaptations Under Cascading Failures for Mission-Oriented Networks”, was published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Network and Service Management’s September 2019 volume.