Information-Centric Networking for mobile military networks

Summary Modern warfare requires an information infrastructure that facilitates extensive information sharing. It is challenging to build networks that can support this in an efficient manner, particularly for mobile forces. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is the name of a group of new network architectures that might form the basis for the future Internet. ICN introduces a completely new way of accessing information in a network by addressing the name of the information instead of the IP address of the server that produces or stores the information. This allows for a better integration of the information infrastructure with the communication infrastructure and can potentially leverage faster and more efficient information sharing. ICN also has some characteristics that can potentially be beneficial for the performance of future mobile military networks. Some of ICN’s interesting characteristics are its ability to efficiently support communication both to a group of receivers and between the source and a single receiver within the same architecture as well as ICN’s ability to handle moving nodes and highly unstable network connections. Given these interesting characteristics, this report explores this emerging and disruptive technology to assess if the technology should be considered for the Norwegian Armed Forces’ future mobile military networks. Our method has been a combination of literature review and experimentation with demonstrators that implement a popular ICN architecture called Named Data Networking (NDN). We have reviewed the literature that studies NDN for mobile military networks and a selection of other relevant studies. As part of the process of building a demonstrator we have implemented an extension to the existing open source code. Our extension supports the search for information in mobile military networks. The extension can be used as a stepping stone for further optimizations of such networks. We have studied how NDN can potentially improve the efficiency and stability of mobile military networks, and we list a range of potential advantages as well as known challenges with the use of NDN in mobile military networks. We have studied in more detail methods used to find information in the network since this is important for the tradeoff between efficiency and robustness in mobile military network. It is also important for NDN’s ability to support the information infrastructure. Finally we have studied how well NDN can support the information infrastructure and have compared NDN with two relevant Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approaches. We conclude that NDN is worth studying closer, but that the maturity is low. The studies have strengthened our view that this architecture has interesting characteristics for use in mobile military networks. We also acknowledge that there are unresolved challenges associated with the NDN architecture that must be solved before this architecture can be considered for deployment in the military networks. Examples are; design of a scalable namespace, confidentiality protection of the search for information as well as efficient and robust search for information in mobile military networks. We recommend further studies of this architecture as it matures, to see if the challenges can be solved in a sound manner.