Traffic Prioritization in Tactical Networks Aligned with Commander Navy SBIR FY2012.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2012.1 Topic No.: N121-098 Topic Title: Traffic Prioritization in Tactical Networks Aligned with Commander Proposal No.: N121-098-0799 Firm: Progeny Systems Corporation 9500 Innovation Drive Manassas, Virginia 20110 Contact: Nik Keapproth Phone: (703) 368-6107 Web Site: www.progeny.net Abstract: Information exchanges in tactical networks enable coordination, planning, and effective employment of platforms in support of national defense strategies. While spectrum utilization, satellite resources, and compression technologies are growing slowly, bandwidth drivers such as information gathering systems, cooperative engagement systems, and video teleconferencing are being increasingly relied upon to facilitate coordination among US and allied forces, and are growing more rapidly. In order to address conflicts or resource limitations, the Navy implements prioritizations to ensure that data from critical systems or of specific types are passed before lower precedence data. But the missions of today's Navy continue to broaden with data priorities. Relevance of a particular piece of information to the mission may be dependent on details of the data itself, rather than simply the transport, protocol, source, or destination. Progeny Systems envisions a system through which the commander of a tactical grouping of ships may define prioritizations for data of many types based on rules that are evaluated in real-time as the traffic is processed. The critical differences will be the ability to inspect the data packets to apply priorities based on metadata or contents, and for the commander to modify the rules dynamically as the situation changes. Benefits: Progeny proposes to leverage our unique experience with several key aspects of the issue. Our data prioritization software has been fielded on surface ships as part of the Undersea Warfare Decision Support System (USWDSS) since 2003, allowing the prioritization and bandwidth management of data streams from USWDSS based on port, protocol, and address through a software application. Adding of a data aware prioritization capability has been progressing and would be easily achievable under the efforts of an SBIR. The software application also has the ability to set up specific profiles for different data prioritization. These profiles could be easily adapted to address different mission requirements. Another aspect of data aware prioritization is to allow flexibility and control as to who gets what data. Progeny has developed the ability to create a logical construct to represent a composition of platforms (such as a strike group) under the command of a single privileged operator (such as the warfare commander and his staff) which has been successfully demonstrated and fielded since 2008 in USWDSS. "Strike Group Management" provides the mechanism through which any platform's subsystems can be aligned - with minimal operator involvement and minimal opportunity for error - to communicate with the force, with a shared concept of force topology (role assignments per-platform) and geographic area of interest. Furthermore, Progeny is actively researching and developing a three-tiered data-aware prioritization mechanism under Phase II SBIR contract for topic OSD05-NC3 ("Guaranteed Data Integrity in the GIG"). Under this topic, Progeny is developing the rules, concept of operations, and a prototype of the enabling software to implement content-based prioritization on a system-level. We propose to leverage our results in system-level data-aware prioritization on a broader scale, to platform-level communications. Return