Inspired by a
vision of the midnight ride of Paul Revere to alert the Colonists during our
Revolutionary War: "If the British march by land or sea from the town
to-night, hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch of the North Church tower as
a signal light,-- one if by land, and two if by sea; and I on the opposite
shore will be, ready to ride and spread the alarm through every Middlesex
village and farm, for the country folk to be up and to arm."
“These days, the problem isn't how to innovate; it's how to get society
to adopt the good ideas that already exist.’ — Douglas Engelbart
KEYWORDS: Heartbeat,
Beacon, TCP/IP, heartbeat / beacon sub-protocol, synchronicity,
interoperability, Public Safety Answering Points – PSAPS, e9-1-1 next
generation, advanced network reconfiguration management, enhanced network
forensic analysis and net effects, Six Sigma process, procedures, methodology,
, spontaneous integration, network centric warfare, network centric warfare enabled
operations, XML heart beat UTO messages, XML Messaging, child schemas, data
islands, NIEM payloads, state management. Universal Message Parsing
BACKGROUND: The
Heart Beacon addresses the congressional directive: “nothing less than network
centric Homeland Security akin to Network Centric Warfare”. Specifically: situational awareness,
alerting, emergency response telecommunications among a plurality of complex systems
and networks enabling spontaneous (re) integration” or task (re) organization
among disparate, military / commercial systems. Intent: extend military network
centric warfare procedures developed over decades of operational use (e.g., the
Balkan Conflict and Gulf Wars I and II) in use by the Department of Homeland
Security since 2004 for situational awareness on its Blackberry and other hand
held smart phone Personal Digital Assistant type devices to enhance
synchronized, and standardized, interoperable situational awareness
understanding horizontally and vertically as fee for public services n-1-1
(i.e., synchronized public 311, 411, 511, 711 and in particular e9-1-1 services.)
NOVELTY OF
CONCEPT: there is no replacement now or projected for heartbeat / beacon “intervals
in time.” The heartbeat / beacon (used interchangeably by industry and in a few
instances combined) is simply an interval in time allocated to gather data from
TCP/IP networked devices, hosts, platforms, smart phones, laptops, handhelds that
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration DARPA (Vinton Cerf “The
Father of the Internet” et al) developed forty years ago. The opportunity in time “heartbeat data
fields” will continue to exist into TCP/IP Version 6 and beyond. The history of this innovative application is
that Vinton Cerf and his team left data fields / time slots open for future
applications unknown at that time. Necessity being the mother of paper, his
organization DARPA and its subordinate organization Communications Electronics
Command for the Army uses TCP-IP’s unallocated, unused, intervals in time /
data fields to gather unique data types–
in particular the Organization ID or ORG ID.
Many systems account
for single adhoc end user mobility. Few,
account for group mobility in context with other groups in large organizations e.g.,
military Divisions, Corps, and more recently, cross agency operational
synchronicity. Novel data types harvested at synchronized periods in time yield
greater and more versatile network management options for more advanced network
forensic functions like adhoc re-organization of disparate units. By applying
the discipline as to when units may gather data on low bandwidth cellular radio
links, saturation and congestion are mitigated – extremely useful in light of
the
cellular 9/11 scenario.
The Heart Beacon
In the figure above, several commercial products are cited: Symmetricom and
Infoblox. Symmetricom generates,
distributes, and applies precise time and frequency solutions synchronizing the
network. Symmetricom Global Position System GPS Network Time Protocol NTP
network time synchronization products with atomic clock accuracy ensure that
time is synchronized and accurate throughout the network. The Heartbeat
sub-protocol is set at millisecond through 99 minute increments that are kept
accurate and synchronous by referencing Symmetricom’s time sync pulses at
atomic clock accurate frequencies’ e.g., the atomic clock at the Cheyenne
Mountain Complex supporting NORAD and the emerging Cyber Warfare Command.
Heart Beacon Brochure