To the Edge of the Fog: Location of Smart Fusion Nodes for Optimal Use of Communication Networks

In many military situations, emplacing assets at the tactical edge with smart processing capabilities is cost and/or risk prohibitive. At the same time, as more and more sensors are deployed on assets to collect and/or generate data, efficiently routing that data through communication degraded or contested environments becomes extremely difficult. This research focuses on the determination of which nodes in a network should be smart, with the ability to process/fuse data that is routed through them, in order to reduce the overall amount of data flowing over the network as well as potentially increasing the value of the data flowing over the network.