Overview of challenging airborne network technology research areas identified by top government scientists

It is the next frontier of networking—a frontier where communication nodes may move at Mach speeds, wireless line of sight covers hundreds of miles, and weather affects communications capabilities such as chat and e-mail. It is the airborne network (AN). In the coming years, the military services and commercial aviation enterprises will internetwork their respective fleets of airborne assets. For the military, these assets range from unmanned aircraft, smart munitions, and fast-moving fighter aircraft to “air stationary” tankers and slow-moving cargo planes. This fast-paced, ever-changing environment presents challenges across all network layers—from basic connectivity and linking/routing challenges to management of the proposed global network. Accordingly, military entities define the AN as the sum total of all capabilities required for conducting airborne network-centric operations to shorten the kill chain and facilitate the synchronized flow of relevant information by extending the Global Information Grid (GIG) to the airborne domain (see figure).

With administrative support from the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s Erie Canal Chapter, AFRL recently hosted the first annual Airborne Network Technology Review Days—a landmark event comprising the Air Force’s first-ever public forum for outlining its goals associated with connecting airborne assets to the GIG. This forum served as the public’s introduction to the AN technologies of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Federal Aviation Administration, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, all of which presented straightforward, detailed AN deployment challenges to event participants from industry and academia. The event’s final discussion forum consisted of a technology panel focused on the challenges confronting the successful deployment of an AN and on the related research areas needing more emphasis.

Many of the identified challenges mirror the problems associated with nodes joining and leaving any network environment and thus include such issues as topology, routing, and addressing. Certain network protocols are simply not amenable to environments that are defined by intermittent connections and delayed acknowledgments—typical occurrences in tactical military networks. During the Review Days forum, technology panel members advocated research in network theory that would aid system designers in determining, in advance, the limitations that certain environments impose on specific protocols. Lacking advanced understanding in network theory, researchers must rigorously examine both existing and emerging protocols to determine if they demonstrate the essential characteristics, including security, that an AN requires—a daunting challenge given the number of potential protocols. Essentially, for every protocol that meets an AN requirement, that same protocol fails at two others. Furthermore, both the tasks of formulating improved network theory and those associated with performing exhaustive testing require researchers to define metrics for qualifying and quantifying required performance.