Ad hoc network management with C2 data models

Military networks, particularly at tactical echelons, are bandwidth limited and are subject to reconfiguration at little or no notice. The US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has been applying the concept of Default Operational Organizations (DOO) and Universal Surrogate Keys (USKs) to this military environment in order to develop a data model capable of supporting both military planning and technical aspects of networking. The DOO/USK concept was used to analyze the problem of managing IP addresses in rapidly changing ad-hoc organizations while minimizing overhead traffic on congested, low-capacity nets. The Joint Common Database was selected as a starting point, and proposed extensions to it have been developed to support network operations during operational planning, operations, and reconfigurations. In this way a database oriented primarily to logistic and situational awareness data may be applied to the problem of management of military low bandwidth networks. The desired result is a data model that supports military operational and logistical planning as well as development of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) systems. The proposed extensions were implemented in an Access database and the resulting "scale model" database populated with notional trial data. Management tools were developed in Access to exercise the database and indicate functionality of the database structure in support of several common network management tasks.