Kyle Usbeck

Masters Student, Research Assistant
Department of Computer Science
Drexel University
3141 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, 19104
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Software Engineer
Drakontas LLC.
Suite #1
115 East Glenside Avenue
Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA, 19038
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The SWAT Laboratory is a unique facility developed at Drexel University under the Applied Communications and Information Networking (ACIN) program to study integration, networking and information assurance for next-generation wireless mobile agent systems. SWAT is an implemented system that fully integrates: (1) mobile agents, (2) wireless ad hoc multi-hop networks, and (3) security.

The ACIN Technology Center

ACIN is America's first small business accelerator dedicated to serving the US Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. The Drexel University ACIN Laboratory Facilities were established in 2001 in Camden, New Jersey. The ACIN Center is located in the Waterfront Technology Center and comprises a 20,000 square-foot facility that has been designed exclusively to accommodate work on DoD programs by Drexel University and businesses and startups in the biosciences, microelectronics, advanced materials, C4ISR, information technology and other high-tech and life sciences fields. Drexel University's ACIN research laboratories support the work of over 75 students and faculty. The ACIN facility is qualified for “DoD-secret” level R&D under the existing contact DAAB07-01-9-L504 and currently supports research grants and contracts from the US Army, DARPA, NSA, ONR, NSF, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and the US Library of Congress. All project participants, including students, are citizens of the United States of America.

SWAT

SWAT is a live system of mobile computers such as PDAs and tablet PCs, examples of which are shown in the figure below. Each computer is equipped with radio frequency (RF) communication devices and routing protocols to act as a node of a wireless mobile ad hoc network (MANET). MANETs require no pre-existing infrastructure, and therefore eliminate the network infrastructure as a point-of-failure. High-level design objectives for SWAT include the following:

Survivable - maximize power/resource usage.
Secure - pass confidential information between hosts.
Stable - maintain redundant and fault-tolerant services.
Distributed - eliminate single points-of-failure.

The difficulty in realizing these design objectives is the limited, unpredictable, and unreliable nature of the MANET on which SWAT runs. SWAT's solution uses mobile agents to distribute computing tasks, deliver applications and application data between hosts, monitor the stability and integrity of the system, and secure all network traffic. Agent systems are ideal for MANETs because of their properties of parallelism, reliability/redundancy, modularity, and reasoning. Since its creation, SWAT has been instrumental in demonstrating how traditionally designed applications fail in MANET environments. Furthermore, SWAT continues to be utilized as a real-life testbed for algorithms and applications that have thus far only been tested in simulation. Some experiments that have been conducted using SWAT are depicted and described in the following figure.

Various experiments conducted with SWAT: a) Camden, NJ provided a testing ground for multi-hop communications in MANETs. b) The SWAT development team prepares to test secure, group-based communication applications. c) The buildings of center-city Philadelphia, PA proved useful for stressing the limits of 802.11b wireless networks and providing interesting network topologies for testing different routing algorithms in MANETs. d) An experiment at Ft. Dix demonstrated SWAT's security and survivability under difficult network operation conditions such as group merge and partition.

Recent Demos

One of our most recent demos was at AAAI 2008 in Chicago. Below is a video demonstrating a human-robot teaming project.