NATO STO

Tactical (edge) networks are characterized by their heterogeneity in networking and radio technologies, their high network dynamics and their limited bandwidth, posing challenges to efficient communications especially in larger coalition settings. In particular, enabling group communications in the (coalition) heterogeneous tactical environment still poses a major challenge. E.g. existing routing strategies show limitations in terms of scalability and efficiency which is especially costly when running group services between soldiers in the field. This TAP will focus on research to explore generic tactical (edge) network infrastructure and protocols that supports group services. IST-124/RTG-061 has studied different ways to build heterogeneous networks in a mobile military environment primarily with the IP network architecture as a baseline. The group concluded that there is still much more research that is needed to build flexible, reliable, and resilient networks in this challenging environment and wants to keep focus on this area. This proposal suggests studying solutions for heterogeneous networking within (e.g., IP multicast) as well as outside of the traditional IP architecture (i.e., Information Centric Networking (ICN)) with a major focus on supporting efficient group communications in this environment. Both connectivity, QoS, and efficient data dissemination are of interest. The activity will continue developing and utilizing the emulation testbed environment that was developed by the IST-124 group to facilitate efficient research collaboration for heterogeneous network research and might do a collaborative experiment at CWIX to evaluate promising approaches.