Enabling the deployment of COTS applications in tactical edge networks

The increasing adoption of COTS hardware and software technologies in tactical scenarios raises the issue of supporting the deployment of legacy and COTS applications in extremely dynamic and challenging environments such as tactical edge networks (TENs). COTS applications adopt standards devised for wired Internet environments or corporate networks, such as service oriented architectures, and TCP and UDP, thus exhibiting severe reliability and performance problems on TENs. To support the reuse and deployment of COTS applications in TENs, there is the need to develop solutions that mediate the application requirements with the communication semantics of TENs. This article presents an overview of the challenges in deploying COTS applications in TENs and presents NetProxy, a state-of-the-art solution explicitly designed to address them.