Resilient Networking for the Tactical Edge

In future conflicts, military forces will be required to operate in smaller, mobile constructs, with increased awareness of their presence in the physical and electromagnetic domains. These units must be able to command and control without connection to an overarching network or the continuous need for satellite communications. Their networks must be node-aware, self-forming, and self-healing, with the ability to add and remove transports depending on spectrum availability in the area.

Networks of the future will self-configure for high bandwidth communications, but will function with low bandwidth alone and they will be tolerant of transports with various latency and capacity (cellular, satellite communications (SATCOM), direct line of sight, free space optic, tactical data links). These resilient tactical networks will enable automatic primary, alternative, contingency, emergency (PACE) communications between all available transports and manage capacity to ensure quality of service across the network. Commercial software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) technologies have the potential to bring critical capability in enabling the much-needed revolution towards resilient tactical networking, however, these solutions are limited by a focus toward fixed enterprise networks.

In this webinar, we will explore how SD-WAN can be augmented to meet the unique challenges of the tactical edge network including latency and throughput disparity, heterogenous networks, encryption, disconnected operations, efficient authentication methods and centralized orchestration.