Publications

Software-defined cognitive radios (CRs) use voice as a primary input/output (I/O) modality and are expected to have substantial computational resources capable of supporting advanced speech- and audio-processing applications. This chapter extends previous work on speech applications (e.g., [1]) to cognitive services that enhance military mission capability by capitalizing on automatic processes, such as speech information extraction and understanding the environment. Such capabilities go beyond interaction with the intended user of the software-defined radio (SDR) - they extend to speech and audio applications that can be applied to information that has been extracted from voice and acoustic noise gathered from other users and entities in the environment. For example, in a military environment, situational awareness and understanding could be enhanced by informing users based on processing voice and noise from both friendly and hostile forces operating in a given battle space. This chapter provides a survey of a number of speech- and audio-processing technologies and their potential applications to CR, including: - A description of the technology and its current state of practice. - An explanation of how the technology is currently being applied, or could be applied, to CR. - Descriptions and concepts of operations for how the technology can be applied to benefit users of CRs. - A description of relevant future research directions for both the speech and audio technologies and their applications to CR. A pictorial overview of many of the core technologies with some applications presented in the following sections is shown in Figure 10.1. Also shown are some overlapping components between the technologies. For example, Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and support vector machines (SVMs) are used in both speaker and language recognition technologies [2]. These technologies and components are described in further detail in the following sections. Speech and concierge cognitive services and their corresponding applications are covered in the following sections. The services covered include speaker recognition, language identification (LID), text-to-speech (TTS) conversion, speech-to-text (STT) conversion, machine translation (MT), background noise suppression, speech coding, speaker characterization, noise management, noise characterization, and concierge services. These technologies and their potential applications to CR are discussed at varying levels of detail commensurate with their innovation and utility.

RCM (Robust Collaborative Multicast) is a communication service designed to support collaborative applications operating in dynamic, mission-critical environments. RCM implements a set of well-specified message ordering and reliability properties that balance two conflicting goals: a)providing low-latency, highly-available, reliable communication service, and b) guaranteeing global consistency in how different participants perceive their communication. Both of these goals are important for collaborative applications. In this paper, we describe RCM, its modular and flexible design, and a collection of simple, light-weight protocols that implement it. We also report on several experiments with an RCM prototype in a test-bed environment.

Software-defined radios and cognitive radios offer tremendous promise, while having great need for user authentication. Authenticating users is essential to ensuring authorized access and actions in private and secure communications networks. User authentication for software-defined radios and cognitive radios is our focus here. We present various means of authenticating users to their radios and networks, authentication architectures, and the complementary combination of authenticators and architectures. Although devices can be strongly authenticated (e.g., cryptographically), reliably authenticating users is a challenge. To meet this challenge, we capitalize on new forms of user authentication combined with new authentication architectures to support features such as continuous user authentication and varying levels of trust-based authentication. We generalize biometrics to include recognizing user behaviors and use them in concert with knowledge- and token-based authenticators. An integrated approach to user authentication and user authentication architectures is presented here to enhance trusted radio communications networks.

This paper describes the architecture of a system being developed to defend information systems using coordinated autonomic responses. The system will also be used to test the hypothesis that an effective defense against fast, distributed information attacks requires rapid, coordinated, network-wide responses. The core components of the architecture are a run-time infrastructure (RTI), a communication language, a system model, and defensive components. The RTI incorporates a number of innovative design concepts and provides fast, reliable, exploitation-resistant communication and coordination services to the components defending the network, even when challenged by a distributed attack. The architecture can be tailored to provide scalable information assurance defenses for large, geographically distributed, heterogeneous networks with multiple domains, each of which uses different technologies and requires different policies. The architecture can form the basis of a field-deployable system. An initial version is being developed for evaluation in a testbed that will be used to test the autonomic coordination and response hypothesis.