Supporting COTS applications in Tactical Edge Networks

Military applications are relying more and more on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and software to build their information infrastructure. However, many COTS applications have been designed for wired infrastructure networks, where bandwidth and latency are not a problem, and exhibit severe performance problems when deployed in Tactical Edge Networks. To address the issues that traditional transport protocols, such as TCP, exhibit in this environment, researchers proposed several transport protocol solutions specifically developed for Tactical Edge Networks. However, these solutions require modifications to the applications in order to be adopted. This paper presents the Agile Computing Middleware (ACM) NetProxy: a proxy-based approach to support the deployment of COTS applications on Tactical Edge Networks. NetProxy transparently intercepts the applications' TCP and UDP traffic and conveys it over Mockets-based connections, while also providing other useful features such as stream compression. We tested NetProxy in an emulated environment and the results demonstrate that, besides enabling the deployment of COTS applications, NetProxy is also capable of improving their performance.