Demonstration of Robust Tactical Airborne Cloud (RT-ABC)

During the Phase I effort, a combat-cloud enabling software application was demonstrated in a laboratory setting. For the Phase II effort, we propose further development to improve the persistence and resiliency of the architecture that will culminate with realistic field testing within a heterogeneous set of platforms including airborne assets, ground vehicles, and soldier-worn devices. The proposed mobile cloud computing application will create and enhance net-enabled combat capability alongside the future Joint Aerial Layer Network. The architecture is dynamic and permits airborne, space-based and terrestrial-based nodes to join and depart the cloud at will. Nodes are permitted to be clients requesting services and/or servers offering services. The robust, tactical airborne cloud (RT-ABC) includes the ability to provide remote accessibility, dynamically adjustable and shared pool of configurable resources, resizable computing and storage availability, and distributed services such as target and/or emitter identification and geolocalization, among others. The system allows bandwidth-, storage-, and processor-constrained platforms to make use of distributed shared resources to accomplish tasks previously only possible with commercial and fixed cloud-computing resources. Moreover, the system will be robust with respect to node dropouts and will support authentication and communication security protocols.