Opportunities and challenges for named data networking to increase the agility of military coalitions

Abstract

The fundamental aim of this paper is to position the opportunities and challenges for adopting Named Data Networking (NDN) in the specific context of military coalition operations and tactical networks. The characteristic properties of tactical networks include high dynamics in multiple dimensions: bandwidth, network congestion, frequent topological changes, geographical mobility of assets, as well as dynamic changes in information access policies. Furthermore, coalition networks must provide secure and efficient communication across coalition boundaries and mitigate the impact of adversarial entities attempting to obstruct the mission. In this paper, we elaborate on the basic NDN architecture characteristics, including robust data discovery and retrieval over ad hoc and intermittent connectivity, inherent security, efficient content distribution, and automatic in-network caching; we also articulate how the above properties can all be utilized to enable resilient and secure data collection, improve the analytics capacity of the network, and to speed up and improve the quality of distributed decision making in challenging coalition environments.