SOCOM SmartContent

Department of Defense (DOD) and Intelligence Community (IC) information systems increasingly rely on access to enterprise hosted cloud infrastructures, such as the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (ICITE), for data exploitation. However, many DOD operators are required to operate in austere situations, where disconnected, limited or intermittent (DIL) communications impose significant constraints to data and knowledge sharing. Advances in network optimization methodologies provide ways to partially address bidirectional cloud-device transmission issues, but a more comprehensive solution requires that content transmission decisions take into account the operational relevance of the data (i.e. the purpose of the data) for determining 1) the content that should be transmitted, and 2) where it should be prepositioned and cached for maximum availability to those who need it. Additionally, this concept of operational relevance must drive efficient and opportunistic provisioning, caching, and synchronization of distributed network resources, where connectivity is limited, intermittent, or, in some cases, non-existent for several days at a time. The SOCOM SmartContent research effort will leverage the strong foundation provided by RGIs government-funded content delivery and deployed proxy technologies to address these issues, facilitating the next stages of development for transition to DOD, government, and commercial stakeholders.