Quick Fire: A standardization-friendly network stack for exploiting short lived links in contested spaces

The lack of scalability of wireless networks, especially in the presence of mobile links, has been a long-standing problem that some field experts have come to regard as akin to rocket science. That said, the emergence of the short-lived flow model motivates a useful restatement of the goal of scaling wireless networks. When the goal is limited to rapidly constructing short-lived flows --whether it is out of a desire for silence, jamming-resistance, or simply congestion-avoidance— the problem intriguingly becomes tractable, albeit not with the MAC & network protocols du jour. We propose to develop an innovative time-frequency MAC, which when cross-layered with clean-slate network patterns and simplified transport control, allows for low latency and high goodput, and notably for a diverse range of traffics. Our designs and validation build upon application specific network patterns that we have developed and validated at scale in past programs. We also leverage an architectural framework for realizing cross-layered micro-protocols in a manner that preserves the narrow waist of the network so as to enable portability, reusability, and heterogeneity.