Policy Enabled ITA Sensor Fabric, A Distributed Framework for the Validation of Experimental Algorithms Using Real and Simulated Sensors

Research into the retrieval and dissemination of mission-specific information across sensor networks is leading to the development of many novel new algorithms and the definition of new paradigms for configuring and enforcing communication flow policies amongst the various components. Testing the relative merits of such algorithms and policies, and exploring interoperability issues between them, is difficult unless they share a common test and validation framework. The wide variety of algorithms being developed (including ontological, mission scripting, resource allocation, network routing, data fusion algorithms, and policies) presents unique challenges to the development of such a framework and its subsequent instrumentation to provide experimental results. This work demonstrates a prototype of such framework (or "Fabric"), built on top of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, used in a real-world sensor network deployment to experiment with the deployment of algorithms and gathering of live sensor data.