Management and routing protocols for military networks
Timothy Gibson · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
Net-Centric Warfare, in all of its forms, revolves around the Internet Protocol suite, using it as the foundation for data transfers. We briefly examine the origins of the Internet Protocol and its design philosophies, as well as the problems this design causes military tactical data systems and radio links. The DARPA Control Plane program's goal was to solve some of these problems; the program's work is covered in sections two and three. An important lesson from the Control Plane program is the ability to maintain much more knowledge, or "state," about networks than was previously thought possible. Given the new ability to maintain more state about both the network and the connections within the network, it is possible to manage military networks in a more controlled fashion than we have in the past. The last two sections of the paper explore a possible approach for more controlled and manageable networks, as well as some of the potential benefits.