Architectural Consequences of Domain Formation in Tactical Edge Networks

The separation of military network users at the tactical edge into multiple "domains", "enclaves", or "clusters" is prevalent in today\´s network architectures and is likely to continue indefinitely. Several factors promote the formation of these domains even within relatively small geographic regions, and these different domains do not typically support easy network interconnection with each other. This paper describes some major reasons that separate domains are formed, including organization around PHY/DLL waveforms, division into domains following uniform management and policy rules, separation of domains with different security implementations and policies, and separation of domains by program of record. It proceeds to describe some of the obstacles to interconnectivity among different domains, and then considers what types of architectures-focusing on topology and routing-are likely to best support the many inevitably separate domains of military tactical edge network users. Core Hub-based and Mesh-based architectures are considered and compared. Since neither of these architectures is clearly more feasible or more likely to be the dominant architecture at the tactical edge, important topics for research and development are presented for the enhancement of each of them.