DARPA Progress Towards Affordable, Dense, and Content Focused Tactical Edge Networks

Marshall

tactical edge wnan content-based networking manet cognitive radio

@inproceedings{marshall:milcom-2008,
  author={Marshall, P.}, 
  title={{DARPA} Progress Towards Affordable, Dense, and
         Content Focused Tactical Edge Networks}, 
  booktitle={{IEEE} Military Communications Conference ({MILCOM})},
  year={2008}, 
  month={November},
  publisher={{IEEE}}
}

Combination of:

• Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA)
• Content-based Networking (CBN)
• Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN)

Among WNaN objectives:

• "The Network Will Have Intelligent Multicast Protocols and Caching Mechanisms to Use Scarce Wireless Bandwidth Efficiently"
• "The Network Will Create a Distributed Computing Environment where the Applications and Services are Populated/Migrated onto Nodes According to Traffic Flows and Resource Availability"
• "The Architecture Will Provide Persistent Caching and Content-Based Access of Information Within the Network"
• "Disruptive Tolerant Networking (DTN) Will be a Native Mode of the Network, not an Overlay"
• "New Policies and Policy Controlled Functions can be Introduced Asynchronously, without code changes, and linked symbolically through an extensible semantic structure"

MIMO in this context used to "maximizes the minimum performance, rather than maximizes the maximum performance" as in commercial use.

"Prior work in self forming networks and related technologies has generally focused on discovering and exploiting all of the possible connectivity. At some level of network density, this situation will reverse; the network will need to organize its topology to reduce the complexity and interactivity of the connectivity."

• Interference range typically well in excess of communications range

"A strong argument can be made that mobile users are inherently correlated. The demand for certain types of information, such as maps, local attractions, phone calls, directory services all would appear to be correlated. If backhaul bandwidth is precious, why move this information more than once?"

"Late binding, requests for, or provision of information is not required to be resolved to a specific network or node address. Instead, the request or content is "launched" towards the general direction of the ultimate destination, and the specific destination is determined as the bundle approaches the destination region."

• "Betails regarding name spaces, subnet structure and reachability need not be propagated through the network, or be available at the time the information is generated or requested."
• "Nodes and networks that are disconnected can address content and have content directed to them, and local names and other meta-data need only be distributed locally within a DTN region, rather than globally."

"A consideration in much of the DARPA wireless research is that intra-edge bandwidth will often be plentiful and that the performance constraint lies not in the edge itself, but in linking the connected edge to the connected core."

• Network connectivity & bandwidth actually has real shape: High at core and edge, low between.