Cross-domain Solutions Research Articles

Toward Resilient Network Slicing for Satellite–Terrestrial Edge Computing IoT

Satellite-Terrestrial Edge Computing Networks (STECNs) emerged as a global solution to support multiple Internet of Things (IoT) applications in 6G networks. The enabling technologies to slice STECNs such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN), satellite edge computing, and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are key to realizing this vision. In this paper, we survey and analyze network slicing solutions for STECNs. We discuss slice management and orchestration for different STECNs integration architectures, satellite edge computing, mmWave/THz, and AI solutions to make network slicing adaptive. In addition, we identify challenges and open issues to slice STECNs. In particular, resilient network slicing is crucial for essential and critical services. Network failures are unavoidable in large networks and can cause significant disruptions in network slicing, compromising many services. To this end, we present a resilient network slicing design to cope with failures and guarantee service continuity which is agnostic to the integration architecture and inherently multi-domain. Further, we present strategies to achieve resilient networking and slicing in STECNs including planning and provisioning of redundant network resources, design rules for service level agreement decomposition, and cross-domain solutions to detect and mitigate failures. Finally, promising future research directions are highlighted. This paper provides valuable guidelines for slicing STECNs and will benefit key sectors, such as smart healthcare, e-commerce, industrial IoT, and education, among others.

Библиографическая ссылка на онлайновую публикацию

What happens to the bibliographic reference when scientific publications turn from printed publications to online ones? At first glance, very little: a hyperlink to this work's online position may be added to the usual bibliographic information. However, even GOST R 7.0.5–2008 "Bibliographic reference," which was published more than 10 years ago, already provided for specifying two additional online attributes in this reference: the date when the author of the reference last accessed it, and the date when the version of the publication used by the author was posted. Over the years, much has changed in this area, and some of the old hyperlink attributes have lost their relevance. However, through the increased capacity of cross-domain solutions, now there is the technical possibility to include dynamically important to online reader information in the text of online bibliographic reference. In particular, the number of visits to work yesterday and total visits from the date of posting, the number of references to this work according to Google Scholar and/or Crossref, the date of the latest available revision of the text, etc. are in high demand by online readers. Such opportunities, which are very topical for a modern author of scientific publication, are unfortunately ignored in Russian state standard P 7.0.108-2022, which was introduced in 2022.

Концепции США и Китая по использованию космических систем для решения военно-политических задач

The article draws upon the assumption that the U.S.–China struggle for global leadership is inevitable. At present, we witness the surge of interest towards the “active phase” of trade wars flaring since President Trump’s taking office. But what is requiring to shed light on is whether the bilateral antagonism may switch to the outer space with 95% of space technologies possessed by the states being dual. Proceeding from this logic, the author examines the extent of reciprocal preparedness towards turning space into a theater of war. The author claims that the space factor has been taken into account by the U.S. military strategists since the last decade of the 20th century, though the more vivid impetus was given by the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization report published in 2001 which revealed insufficient readiness of military and intelligence services to use space for heading off perspective threats. As a result, stepping from pledges to reject any limitations on the fundamental right of a country to operate in and acquire data from space including defense and intelligence-related activities, the United States then came to proclamation of more precise guidelines on how to protect national interests depriving the adversary of potential advantages in space. In due course the issues of “interoperability” of national security systems and their “resilience” came to the fore contributing to better understanding of an impact the cross-domain solutions may have for preventing, countering and sustaining aggression. All in all, space domain mission assurance has become an inalienable part of the U.S. space policy since 2012 already. Amidst the Third Offset Strategy of the United States and Donald Trump’s aspirations for strengthening the American deterrence and warfighting options in space, it is expected that soon we will witness correspondent organizational and planning changes making outer space an area of military operational maneuver. Unlike the U.S., China does not have a space doctrine to contain prescriptions on the military use of space. White papers on space activities are majorly intended to build up the frames of providing national security in a peaceful manner. Meanwhile, the Academy of Military Science of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army publishes the guiding thoughts defining the Chinese vision of the future military affairs. It states the combination of soft- and hard-kill techniques to coerce the adversary and achieve space superiority, promotes joint operations implying integration of space operations into the military planning system to enable defensive and offensive activities, whether it be space deterrence or space blockade. In the whole, space is characterized as a “commanding height” applicable in asymmetric warfare and seizing the initiative. At the same time, establishment of Strategic Support Forces responsible inter alia for space activities confirms China’s intention to grant this domain a more active role in providing national security. The author comes to a conclusion that having open and concealed hints at each other in strategic, documents, and possessing certain similarities in the vision of the future space activities, both the U.S. and China are strategically prepared to shifting disputes to the space arena.

Holistic analysis of urban water systems in the Greater Cincinnati region: (1) life cycle assessment and cost implications

Urban water and wastewater utilities are striving to improve their environmental and economic performances due to multiple challenges such as increasingly stringent quality criterion, aging infrastructure, constraining financial burden, growing urban population, climate challenges and dwindling resources. Growing needs of holistic assessments of urban water systems are required to identify systems-level cross-domain solutions. This study evaluated the life cycle environmental and economic impacts of urban water and wastewater systems with two utilities in Greater Cincinnati region as a case study. The scope of this study includes the entire urban water and wastewater systems starting from raw water acquisition for drinking water to wastewater treatment and discharge. The detailed process-based life cycle models were developed based on the datasets provided by local water and wastewater utilities. The life cycle assessment indicated that the operation and maintenance of drinking water distribution was a dominating contributor for energy consumption (43%) and global warming potential (41%). Wastewater discharge from the wastewater treatment plant contributed to more than 80% of the total eutrophication potential. The cost analysis determined that labor and maintenance cost (19%) for wastewater collection, and electricity cost (13%) for drinking water distribution were major contributors. Electricity purchased by the utility was the driver for the majority of impact categories assessed with the exception of eutrophication, blue water use, and metal depletion. Infrastructure requirements had a negligible influence on impact results, contributing less than 3% to most categories, with the exception of metal depletion where it led to 68% of total burdens. Sensitivity analysis showed that the life cycle environmental results were more sensitive to the choice of the electricity mixes and electricity consumption than the rest of input parameters such as chemical dosages, and infrastructure life time. This is one of the first comprehensive studies of the whole urban water system using real case data. It elucidates a bigger picture of energy, resource and cost distributions in a typical urban centralized water system. Inherent to a modern city as large population centers, a significant expenditure has to be invested to provide water services function (moving water, treating water/wastewater) in order to avoid human and environmental health problems. This study provides insights for optimization potentials of overall treatment efficiency and can serve as a benchmark for communities considering adoption of alternative water systems.

Data Leakage Prevention for Secure Cross-Domain Information Exchange

Cross-domain information exchange is an increasingly important capability for conducting efficient and secure operations, both within coalitions and within single nations. A data guard is a common cross-domain sharing solution that inspects the security labels of exported data objects and validates that they are such that they can be released according to policy. While we see that guard solutions can be implemented with high assurance, we find that obtaining an equivalent level of assurance in the correctness of the security labels easily becomes a hard problem in practical scenarios. Thus, a weakness of the guard-based solution is that there is often limited assurance in the correctness of the security labels. To mitigate this, guards make use of content checkers such as dirty word lists as a means of detecting mislabeled data. To improve the overall security of such cross-domain solutions, we investigate more advanced content checkers based on the use of machine learning. Instead of relying on manually specified dirty word lists, we can build data-driven methods that automatically infer the words associated with classified content. However, care must be taken when constructing and deploying these methods as naive implementations are vulnerable to manipulation attacks. In order to provide a better context for performing classification, we monitor the incoming information flow and use the audit trail to construct controlled environments. The usefulness of this deployment scheme is demonstrated using a real collection of classified and unclassified documents.

Self-Adaptive Strategy Based on Fuzzy Control Systems for Improving Performance in Wireless Sensors Networks.

The solutions to cope with new challenges that societies have to face nowadays involve providing smarter daily systems. To achieve this, technology has to evolve and leverage physical systems automatic interactions, with less human intervention. Technological paradigms like Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are providing reference models, architectures, approaches and tools that are to support cross-domain solutions. Thus, CPS based solutions will be applied in different application domains like e-Health, Smart Grid, Smart Transportation and so on, to assure the expected response from a complex system that relies on the smooth interaction and cooperation of diverse networked physical systems. The Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN) are a well-known wireless technology that are part of large CPS. The WSN aims at monitoring a physical system, object, (e.g., the environmental condition of a cargo container), and relaying data to the targeted processing element. The WSN communication reliability, as well as a restrained energy consumption, are expected features in a WSN. This paper shows the results obtained in a real WSN deployment, based on SunSPOT nodes, which carries out a fuzzy based control strategy to improve energy consumption while keeping communication reliability and computational resources usage among boundaries.

Cross domain solutions – and why they matter

In the 21st Century, all organisations face unprecedented challenges from a range of new behavioural, procedural and environmental factors. Increased instances of data loss or leakage, greater demand for collaborative working, a growing trend for remote and mobile working and the rise in information being exchanged on a ‘responsibility to provide’ basis rather than a ‘need to know’ basis all contribute to a more complex data management landscape. Set against a backdrop of the ever-increasing threat of cyber-attacks as well as the heightened risk of physical terrorist attack, it is clear that data security between domains is now more important than ever.

Bi-criteria risk analysis of domain-specific and cross-domain changes in complex systems

Government and not-for-profit organizations measure success in terms of their ability to promote an organizational mission. Complex assets in such organizations are acquired in a budget-allocation process which reflects mission priorities. So, complex assets in such an environment must be managed so that availability of the asset is sufficient to support mission objectives as planned. But cost must also be contained within the budget plan, or other mission objectives may suffer. Hence, an objective in such environments is to simultaneously control (1) the risk that percent-availability will fall below a minimum planning threshold α, and control (2) the risk that cost will exceed the planned budget β. This problem is especially difficult because the two risks are negatively correlated.In this paper we examine this bi-criteria risk minimization problem, for an organization in which the departments (domains) of the organization must compete for scarce resources to achieve organizational objectives. We develop a model that can be used to assess bi-criteria risk of single-domain proposals, and a ranking-and-selection procedure which can be used to choose between those proposals. We then conduct a limited search of solutions which involve linear combinations of the proposals, in order to investigate the potential benefits of ‘breaking silos’ and ‘cooperation’ across domains. Results suggest that for complex systems at least, cross-domain solutions are not always superior to single-domain solutions, and that integrated system models are needed to properly evaluate single-domain or cross-domain solutions.

Modeling Human-in-the-Loop Security Analysis and Decision-Making Processes

This paper presents a novel application of computer-assisted formal methods for systematically specifying, documenting, statically and dynamically checking, and maintaining human-centered workflow processes. This approach provides for end-to-end verification and validation of process workflows, which is needed for process workflows that are intended for use in developing and maintaining high-integrity systems. We demonstrate the technical feasibility of our approach by applying it on the development of the US government's process workflow for implementing, certifying, and accrediting cross-domain computer security solutions. Our approach involves identifying human-in-the-loop decision points in the process activities and then modeling these via statechart assertions. We developed techniques to specify and enforce workflow hierarchies, which was a challenge due to the existence of concurrent activities within complex workflow processes. Some of the key advantages of our approach are: it results in development of a model that is executable, supporting both upfront and runtime checking of process-workflow requirements; aids comprehension and communication among stakeholders and process engineers; and provides for incorporating accountability and risk management into the engineering of process workflows.

Cross-domain information sharing for next generation interagency experimentation: possibilities and challenges

Successful development of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) requires the coordinated efforts of government agencies and organizations that must work together to respond to aviation-related crises. Interagency experimentation is a powerful technique for achieving this coordination while refining NextGen concepts. To maximize the benefits of this experimentation, the participants must “play” from their preferred research laboratories and at the appropriate classification level. Cross-domain solutions, used for many years in the military and intelligence communities, offer possibilities for connecting the unclassified and classified laboratories in aviation experiments. A MITRE Innovation Program initiative entitled the NextGen Interagency Experimentation Hub is exploring the application of these cross-domain technologies. The project team is working with candidate cross-domain solutions in a multi-lab test environment while gathering lessons learned about deployed solutions. However, cross-domain solutions are costly due to the use of rigorous practices for developing secure software. Further, each cross-domain solution must pass through an approval process that often takes over a year and incurs additional costs. This paper is a compilation of selected results from the MITRE initiative that (1) presents the possibilities cross-domain solutions offer, (2) promotes understanding of the challenges involved in leveraging these solutions, and (3) provides recommendations and guidance for using them effectively in aviation-related interagency experiments.