Enabling Adaptive Communications at the Tactical Edge

One common characteristic of all tactical networks is the challenging and varied environment they have to operate in, resulting in vastly different performance characteristics for these networks. A wide variety of networking technologies may be deployed, and the overall network could be composed of many different heterogeneous elements. Thus, a flexible communications infrastructure that is composed of all these elements is necessary. Such a complex heterogeneous tactical network infrastructure requires new innovative solutions in terms of smart management and adaptive control, as well as interaction between the different networking levels and indeed the applications. Complex heterogeneous mobile tactical networks need to leverage new technologies (such as UAV networks, future mobile core networks, SDN and 5G networks) in combination with traditional military networking technologies. The adaptive control and optimization also need to extend to and consider other infrastructural services such as storage and processing. Furthermore, novel solutions to link network adaptations with analytics to enable the network to maximize 'information-flows' vs 'bit-flows' also requires investigation. This would include the joint orchestration of network, processing, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve information service capacity, resilience, and speed and accuracy of decision-making. This paper describes the vision and objectives for the NATO IST-194 Research Task Group on adaptive communications at the tactical edge.