Network Simulation for Disaster Recovery

In a disaster recovery situation, networks face an increase in constraints for a number of reasons. First, physical constraints such as damage to infrastructure (cell towers, relay stations and cables), equipment shortages due to supply chain disruptions, as well as power outages restrict the amount of bandwidth and equipment and create situations in which entire networks are no longer available. Second, networks are quickly overloaded due to the increase in traffic necessary to respond to the disaster and an increase in the number of users utilizing the network due to the rapid displacement of people. Effective disaster recovery planning for communications networks involves anticipating these constraints and having strategies in place to address them. To immediately respond to disasters, the Air Force must not only have access to a variety of communication hardware devices and the ability to transmit on multiple frequency bands (e.g.,LTE, and 5G), it must be able to connect those disparate resources so it can function as a whole to respond to the disaster.á After more than 10 yearsĺ of RDT&E and $100M in investment, this team designed, built, and successfully deployed into production a first-of-its-kind common control plane technology that can connect any network nodes across land, sea, air, space, and deep space and manage these assets as a single, ubiquitous mesh. For three years and more than three million flight hours, the technology orchestrated Googleĺs Loon network consisting of 100s of stratospheric balloons, ground infrastructure, and commercial nodes, demonstrating its feasibility. In 2022, Aalyria purchased this technology from Google, áin part to bring it to the USG. Spacetime can autonomously connect and orchestrate assets in any domain using any available links across compatible platforms and accessible terrestrial assets, to bring connectivity into existence when and where needed, for the time needed.á This Phase II SBIR will modify the existing, commercially-available, high-TRL Spacetime system for use by AFSOC and CDM to connect any resources/networks in use by the Air Force to enable connectivity critical for effective disaster response. To achieve this, Aalyria will modify our backend, including structuring data in our data model and building out interfaces and adaptors to our open APIs for the various hardware and networks the Air Force has (e.g., space vehicles (SV), payloads, ground station antennas, etc.) to bring these assets into our digital twin. Doing so will allow the Air Force to move directly from prototype to a production-ready capability through pre-integration that makes assets able for immediate use by the Air Force team. Building the necessary interface connections prior to operational need ensures the Air Force can respond when called upon.