Fault tolerance requirements of tactical Information Management systems

Information Management (IM) services provide a powerful capability for military operations, enabling managed information exchange based on the characteristics of the information that is needed and the information that is available, rather than on explicit knowledge of the information consumers, producers, and repositories. To be usable in tactical environments and mission critical operations, IM services need to be resilient to faults and failures, which can be due to many factors, including design or implementation flaws, misconfiguration, corruption, hardware or infrastructure failure, resource intermittency or contention, or hostile actions. This paper presents a reference model for representing the performance and fault tolerance requirements of IM services in tactical operations. A Joint Close Air Support operation is described using this representation and the viability of canonical fault tolerance techniques are examined for a given deployment.