Extending Service-Oriented Architectures to the tactical edge

Service Oriented Architectures allow for seamless integration of heterogeneous systems and extensive service reuse; characteristics that led to a wide adoption of this paradigm in the enterprise and military environment. While SoAs are currently deployed in tactical environments mainly at higher-echelon levels, it is necessary to allow for the exchange of information all the way down to the edge nodes deployed on the ground and back. Because most SoAs implementations were designed to work on reliable infrastructure networks, porting SoAs to the tactical environment requires a complete redesign of the protocol stack to support unreliable, transiently disconnected networks. In this paper, we present our approach to integrate the U.S. Marine Corps´s Marine Command and Control Systems and Applications SoA (MC2SA SoA) with DisServicePro, a middleware that supports proactive dissemination and information on demand in tactical edge networks.