ABSTRACT
Future Defence deployable information systems will require increased flexibility and agility to respond to changing application goals, external threats and complex environments. A key enabler is Software Defined Networks (SDN), which consists of multiple domains of resources that can be owned by different partners and join together to form an appropriately dynamic and efficient infrastructure for communications and computation to support operational tempo and military need.
Software Defined (SD) Slicing aims to enable agile and near-real-time provision and configuration of “slices” of infrastructure resources for supporting future communications and computation applications. Each application invokes a set of distributed analytic services supported by an SD slice, which consists of a set of logical resources in distributed environments (e.g. across several domains). Multiple SD slices are executed concurrently using a set of physical infrastructure assets. Application demands change in real-time, as do SD slices. Slices provide resources to applications that include processing, communications, data-analytics, and sensing within domains which may be both geographically and system physically separated.
We present a 3-level control structure with a global SD-slice controller at the top, domain controllers at the middle, and dynamic flow (micro) controllers at the bottom. Each domain controller has a domain inference engine completing estimation of resource availability per domain. Based on the inferred resource availability in domains, the global controller determines the feasibility of creating a new SD-slice and allocates resources to achieve the required performance of all slices. The dynamic flow controllers allocate resources to data flows according to dynamic conditions.
BIOGRAPHY
Athanasios Gkelias received his Diploma (5 years) degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2000 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from King’s College London, U.K., in 2001 and 2006, respectively. He is currently a Research Fellow with Imperial College London. From 2009 to 2013 he served as the project manager of the University Defence Research Centre (UDRC) in Signal Processing at Imperial College sponsored by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). In 2008, he was at Bell-Labs Research Centre, Alcatel-Lucent, UK, working as a visiting researcher on wireless mesh networks. Over the last 20 years, he has been involved and made significant research contributions to several and diverse ICT projects funded by the European Commission, EPSRC, UK MoD and U.S. Army. His scientific and technical expertise lies in the area of wireless communications, signal processing, networks, localization, machine learning, algorithmic design, modeling and optimization. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed journal, conference papers and book chapters. He was a co-recipient of the Best Student Paper Award in PIMRC 2012. He has been serving as a peer reviewer for various research councils such as Royal Society - UK, EPSRC - UK, National Research Foundation (NRF) - South Africa and European Commission (EU Expert). He is a Senior member of IEEE.

BIOGRAPHY
Professor Patrick J Baker is currently the Head of Science for the Royal Air Force, Rapid Capabilities Office, Air Information Experimentation Division and is Senior Principal Technical Consultant C4ISR for the UK Ministry of Defence – Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Ministry of Defence. Patrick until recently (from 2016) was the Scientific and Technical advisor to the United Kingdom, Land Environment Tactical Communications and Information Systems replacement programme – this is a 10 year £5 Billion pound Capability replacement programme. Patrick is also very active with Academia/Industry through the US/UK Distributed Analytics International Technology Alliance, where he is the Principal Technical Advisor – through this alliance he continues to publish papers in support of Software Defined Networking with a particular user case of Software Defined Coalitions with Yale University in the US and Imperial College in London. Patrick has a large cohort of directly mentored students from undergrad through to PhD – he is a formal PhD marker for Loughborough University in the UK – where, he holds a Visiting Professorship in Communications and Information systems. Patrick often lectures in communications systems and technologies across a wide breadth of Government, Academia and Industry. Patrick is often called upon to brief at the highest level – as an exemplar – recently briefing General Terrance J O’Shaughnessy – USAF – Commander - United States Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) on advances within Mesh Networking and applicability to military user cases. He is also the UK lead within the USINDOPACOM Communications Integration Group. Patrick is also currently advising the Republic of Ireland Army on procurement of future Operational and Tactical Communications capability. Patrick has had an interesting career spanning over 37 Years, initially within the Royal Air Force where he served in a number of communications engineering roles including directly with NATO. On leaving the service he has gone on to work with Boeing Satellite systems in the US, The United Nations - Balkans, The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, Ericsson’s development centre in Sweden, Nokia’s development centre in Finland as examples . Patrick’s breadth of experience has enabled him to develop and deliver diverse solutions/capability from communications protocols/systems through to novel Bio-metric collection and transfer techniques. In 2011 he was awarded a Chief Scientific Advisor to the Ministry of Defence on behalf of the UK Prime Minister for outstanding scientific work in support of Counter Improvised Explosive Device - Information Management and Exploitation.