Class of functions approach to enterprise communications

A typical military enterprise is comprised of a great many entities that may take the form of users, organizations, platforms, and/or nodes, etc. In such an environment, it is important to define and invoke basic principles that facilitates the progress in achieving network-centric communication. One well-known architectural pitfall is any attempt to accomplish communication among N participants with a pair-wise approach. When N is large, this is known as the N-squared problem. It just is not feasible to handle enterprise communication in this fashion. Either one must start with too few nodes that limits the scope of what can be accomplished, or one runs out of resources before all possible N/sup 2/ connections can be effected. This paper describes an alternative architectural approach that assures extensibility in the sense that each participant only needs to apply a given effort to connect with the network. Although the amount of individual effort may vary across the set of participants, the total effort of all participants is linear, i.e., proportional to N - instead of N/sup 2/. An application of this principle to a large network consisting of many airborne platforms is illustrated.