This proposal aims to develop an information service platform, which enables edge devices to efficiently perform distributed computation, information processing, storage, and dissemination in a tactical edge network. The proposed platform exploits a mix of advanced technologies, including distributed coded computing (DCC), fog computing, content-centric networking (CCN), and named function networking (NFN) to address information processing and content management challenges at the tactical edge. Specifically, i) a service-oriented architecture and a novel unified service/content-centric communications framework are designed for publishing, discovery, dissemination, and retrieval of computing services and content objects, which allows in-network resolution of service/content names and function expressions to discover the service/content and route the request to the best server. ii) A DCC framework is developed to enable coded computation offloading and cooperative computing for multiple edge devices to process computation-intensive tasks, such as running machine learning algorithms for object detection and classification. iii) Intelligent content management schemes, including automatic content naming, metadata generation, adaptive content coding, distributed caching, and decentralized ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption and content-based security, are developed to support efficient and secure content dissemination/retrieval and storage in a tactical network. The proposed platform can be implemented as a middleware package on COTS edge devices.
