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. In this update, we present intra-domain and cross-domain resource management schemes that allows the Domain Controllers and Global Controller, respectively, to optimally allocate resources to achieve the required performance of all DS slices. Special focus is given on resource optimization by learning, a new learning approach to improve the iteration convergence of non-convex, constrained optimization problems, which can be proven particularly useful in dynamic military environments.

BIOGRAPHY
Professor Kin K. Leung received his B.S. degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1980, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from University of California, Los Angeles, in 1982 and 1985, respectively. He worked at AT&T Bell Labs and its successor companies in New Jersey from 1986 to 2004. Since then, he has been the Tanaka Chair Professor in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), and Computing Departments at Imperial College in London. He is the Head of Communications and Signal Processing Group in the EEE Department. His current research focuses on optimization and machine learning for design and control of large-scale communication, computer and sensor infrastructures. He also works on multi-antenna and cross-layer designs for wireless networks. He received the Distinguished Member of Technical Staff Award from AT&T Bell Labs (1994), and was a co-recipient of the Lanchester Prize Honorable Mention Award (1997). He was elected an IEEE Fellow (2001), received the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merits Award (2004-09), and became a member of Academia Europaea (2012) and an IET Fellow (2021). Jointly with his co-authors, he received the IEEE ComSoc Leonard G. Abraham Prize (2021) and best paper awards at the IEEE PIMRC 2012, ICDCS 2013 and ICC 2019. He served as a member (2009-11) and the chairman (2012-15) of the IEEE Fellow Evaluation Committee for ComSoc. He served as an editor for the IEEE JSAC: Wireless Series, IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications and IEEE Trans. on Communications. Currently, he chairs the Steering Committee for the IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing, and is an editor for the ACM Computing Survey and International Journal on Sensor Networks. 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. Athanasios (Thanos) Gkelias received his MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering (major in Telecommunications) from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2000. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in 2001 and 2006, respectively, both from the Department of Electronic Engineering, King's College London. Currently, he is a Research Fellow and project manager at 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 U.K. Ministry of Defence (MoD). In the summer of 2008 he was at Bell-Labs Research Centre, Alcatel-Lucent, UK, working as a visiting researcher on wireless mesh networks. He has been involved and made significant research contributions to several and diverse ICT projects funded by the European Commission, EPSRC, U.K. MOD and U.S. Army. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed journal, conference papers and book chapters. He was the co-recipient of the Best Student Paper Award in PIMRC 2012 and the IEEE Communications Society Best Survey Paper Award in 2022. He has served in the organizing or technical-program committee and chaired technical sessions for several major international conferences and workshops in communications, networking and signal processing. His scientific and technical expertise lies in the area of wireless communications, signal processing, networks, localization, machine learning, algorithmic design, modeling and optimization. He is an IEEE Senior Member (2015) and an EU Expert and project evaluator (2019).