TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Ground/Sea Vehicles

ACQUISITION PROGRAM: PEO PMS IWS5E Undersea Warfare - Decision Support Systems, ACAT II

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordance with section 3.5.b.(7) of the solicitation.

OBJECTIVE: Develop automated/intelligent network traffic management algorithms and implementations to support OA/SOA network communications over constrained communications channels.

DESCRIPTION: Many current undersea warfare (USW) combat systems are employing open architecture (OA) implementations that rely on many middleware and communications protocols. The approach that many of these systems take when faced with constrained network communications channels is to utilize highly coupled brokers to read and repack all data for transmission. This approach requires costly reengineering and/or refactoring of the bandwidth as new features are included with future upgrades. Additionally, future systems are implementing Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) for rapid and distributed data access and control. The emergence of SOA, web-service interfaces, along with universal, description, discovery, and integration (UDDI) registry services facilitate the integration of virtual every (USW) combat subsystem and cross platform components. These architectures rely on significant network traffic principally over protocols like SOAP, HTTP/HTTPS, and Axis Multi-Part and Streams. The future USW environment will include distributed networks of multiple sensor and target engagement modules deployed on airborne, surface, and sub-surface platforms that may be manned or unmanned. These loosely-coupled data-intensive SOA architectures will produce new bandwidth demands upon existing shipboard and cross platform network infrastructures.

A major challenge that SOA integration introduces is the effective management of data throughput. Current commercially available XML security gateway products protect web service transactions from malicious code attacks, support data encryption, and enable authentication services. Current network load-balancing products that make application-level decisions based on packet inspection do not support making dynamic packet-level decisions about XML content. Strides have been made in the financial sector to integrate content-based routing tags into XML schema to be interpreted by XML gateway routers in and effort to increase overall quality of service (QoS).

To reduce to costs of system implementations where limited bandwidth access to networks is an issue (i.e. ship to ship communications) approaches to control SOA packet traffic based on the tactical and network operating conditions is imperative. This topic seeks development of open architecture approaches, algorithms, and implementations of network traffic conditioning and filtering which are programmable and dynamically adapt to current operational context/conditions. Approaches should address content and priority based management (routing and filtering) schemes and dynamic context based filtering (e.g. threat condition impact on network loading and use). All approaches must address the types of data/information communicated (tracks, plans, command, control, conversation, etc), priority and management policies, and implementation/application impact on SOA services.

PHASE I: Research and design open architecture approaches, algorithm, and tools for network traffic management across band-limited communications channels. Emphasis will be placed on implementation practicality, open architecture support, and impact on existing or future applications/SOA services.

PHASE II: Implement the Phase I approach and algorithms in a prototype software system. Evaluate performance of implemented approaches/algorithms under simulated mission/stress conditions.

PHASE III: Integrate the Phase II implementation into a US Navy system. Demonstrate and document performance measured during at-sea trials.

PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: This technology has direct application to commercial sector OA network traffic management in time sensitive or band limited networks. This technology has direct application to commercial banking, financial, and accounting systems. Advances in XML content-based routing technology could be used to right size computer internet bandwidth infrastructure that would lead to billions in potential savings.

REFERENCES:
1. IETF RFC 2475 "An Architecture for Differentiated Services", Blake, et. al., December 1998.

2. Ferguson P., Huston G., Quality of Service: Delivering QoS on the Internet and in Corporate Networks, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998. ISBN 0-471-24358-2.

3. Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrated XML and Web Services, Thomas Erl, Prentice Hall, April 2004.

4. Hitchhikers Guide to Network and Wan Optimization Technologies, APConnections, Inc.
http://www.netequalizer.com/bandwidthwhitepaper.php

KEYWORDS: Intelligent agents, Automation, Networks traffic conditioning, Network traffic filtering.

** TOPIC AUTHOR (TPOC) **

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