Dynamic Service-oriented Architectures for Tactical Edge Networks

Service-oriented Architectures (SoAs) have established themselves as a popular approach to building large-scale systems. They were initially motivated by organizations desiring dynamically coupled systems that would support rapid configuration, deployment, and reconfiguration. SoAs support multi-tiered architectures for enterprise backends as well as integration of multiple organizations via well defined interfaces. The success and popularity of SoAs in the Internet has driven the consideration of SoAs for tactical edge networks. However, tactical edge networks are considerably different from the Internet in terms of the type and number of nodes as well as the connectivity between the nodes. Nodes may be transient and resource constrained — battery operated and with limited processing and storage. The communications between nodes may be wireless and ad-hoc, resulting in network partitioning and unreliable, bandwidth constrained, and variable latency links. This paper describes some observations of the target environments, requirements for SoAs for such environments, and experiences with developing SoAs for tactical edge networks.