Meeting DOD's Requirements - FTAM vs. FTP

With the expected availability of commercial versions of the International Standards Organization (ISO) protocols, the Defense Communications Agency (DCA) announced it would forego its own protocol suite in favor of the ISO suite. This transition can be accomplished only when ISO offers comparable services to the original DOD protocol; therefore, an evaluation of these services is necessary. This paper will compare the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), MIL-STD 1780, to File Transfer, Access and Management (FTAM), the ISO Application Layer protocol considered closest to Draft International Status. A mapping of the required FTP service to the corresponding FTAM service points out those parameters left as options in FTAM that are either required in the FTP specification or have become de facto implementation requirements. This paper outlines those parameters and suggests specifications that may meet DOD requirements.