Biblio

Tactical edge networks represent a uniquely challenging environment from the communications perspective, due to their limited bandwidth and high node mobility. Several middleware communication solutions have been proposed to address those issues, adopting an evolutionary design approach that requires facing quite a few complications to provide applications with a suited network programming model while building on top of the TCP/IP stack. Information Centric Networking (ICN), instead, represents a revolutionary, clean slate approach that aims at replacing the entire TCP/IP stack with a new communication paradigm, better suited to cope with fluctuating channel conditions and network disruptions. This paper, stemmed from research conducted within NATO IST-161 RTG, investigates the effectiveness of Named Data Networking (NDN), the de facto standard implementation of ICN, in the context of tactical edge networks and its potential for adoption. We evaluated an NDN-based Blue Force Tracking (BFT) dissemination application within the Anglova scenario emulation environment, and found that NDN obtained better-than-expected results in terms of delivery ratio and latency, at the expense of a relatively high bandwidth consumption.

Due to users' network flow requirement and usage amount nowadays, TCP/IP networks may face various problems. For one, users of video services may access simultaneously the same content, which leads to the host incurring extra costs. Second, although nearby nodes may have the file that a user wants to access, the user cannot directly verify the file itself. This issue will lead the user to connect to a remote host rather than the nearby nodes and causes the network traffic to greatly increase. Therefore, the named data network (NDN), which is based on data itself, was brought about to deal with the aforementioned problems. In NDN, all users can access a file from the nearby nodes, and they can directly verify the file themselves rather than the specific host who holds the file. However, NDN still has no complete standard and secure file transfer protocol to support the ciphertext transmission and the problem of the unknown potential receivers. The straightforward solution is that a sender uses the receiver's public key to encrypt a file before she/he sends the file to NDN nodes. However, it will limit the behavior of users and incur significant storage costs of NDN nodes. This paper presents a complete secure file transfer protocol, which combines the data re-encryption, satisfies the requirement of secure ciphertext transmission, solves the problem of the unknown potential receivers, and saves the significant storage costs of NDN nodes. The proposed protocol is the first one that achieves data confidentiality and solves the problem of the unknown potential receivers in NDN. Finally, we also provide formal security models and proofs for the proposed FTP-NDN.

Mobile military networks are uniquely challenging to build and maintain, because of their wireless nature and the unfriendliness of the environment, resulting in unreliable and capacity limited performance. Currently, most tactical networks implement TCP/IP, which was designed for fairly stable, infrastructure-based environments, and requires sophisticated and often application-specific extensions to address the challenges of the communication scenario. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a clean slate networking approach that does not depend on stable connections to retrieve information and naturally provides support for node mobility and delay/disruption tolerant communications - as a result it is particularly interesting for tactical applications. However, despite ICN seems to offer some structural benefits for tactical environments over TCP/IP, a number of challenges including naming, security, performance tuning, etc., still need to be addressed for practical adoption. This document, prepared within NATO IST-161 RTG, evaluates the effectiveness of Named Data Networking (NDN), the de facto standard implementation of ICN, in the context of tactical edge networks and its potential for adoption.