OPAL - A survivability-oriented approach to management of tactical military networks

It is vital for military networks to persist in the presence of widespread challenges (e.g., natural failures, attacks), some of them hard to predict. To achieve this, these networks not only need to be properly designed and configured from the survivability perspective, but they should be equipped with highly survivable management systems allowing the networks to effectively and efficiently respond to challenges during operations. This paper presents an experimental framework, called OPAL, to investigate strongly distributed cooperative solutions for survivability-oriented management in volatile tactical networks, such as mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). The paper first describes OPAL´s major concepts: Life Signs, Network Awareness and Network Hardening. Then, the current experimental implementation of OPAL is presented, followed by conclusion and an outline of further work.