Dispersed Computing for Tactical Edge in Future Wars: Vision, Architecture, and Challenges

In the future, the tactical edge is far away from the command center, the resources of communication and computing are limited, and the battlefield situation is changing rapidly, which leads to the weak connection and fast changes of network topology in a harsh and complex battlefield environment. Thus, to meet the needs of communication and computing to build a new generation of computing architecture for real-time sharing and service collaboration of tactical edge resources to win the future war, the dispersed computing (DCOMP) seeks a new solution to satisfy the requirements of fast and efficient sensing, transmission, integrating, scheduling, and processing of various information in the tactical edge. Through the research of a traditional computing paradigm of mobile cloud computing (MCC), fog computing (FC), mobile edge computing (MEC), mobile ad hoc network (MANET), etc., it can be found that these computations have difficulty in meeting the high changing and complex battlefield environment and we propose a novel architecture of DCOMP to build a scalable, extensible, and robust decision-making system, to realize powerful and secure communication, computing, storage, and information processing capabilities for the tactical edge. We illustrate the fundamental principles of building a network model, channel allocation, and forwarding control mechanism of the network architecture for DCOMP called DANET and then design a new architecture, programming model, task awareness, and computing scheduling for DCOMP. Finally, we discuss the main requirements and challenges of DCOMP in future wars.