Enabling real-time global reach using a gateway building framework

Abstract

The enterprise and tactical domains have distinct properties and requirements, and have thus evolved independently in incompatible ways. Today the network infrastructure has emerged to, in theory, enable interconnectivity between these domains at a global scale. Unfortunately, even in the presence of these communication capabilities and despite the benefits that each operational domain can gain from access to information held by the other, warfighters at the tactical edge and analysts in enterprise agencies continue to lack meaningful, realtime access to each other's information. The separate evolution of the two domains has led to clients that use different forms of identification and access control, systems that employ different applications and use different data formats, and networks that operate most efficiently under different protocols. To address these differences and the need to meaningfully bridge enterprise and tactical domains, we are developing a framework for Robust Operational Gateways Enabling Reachback/Reach-forward (ROGER). ROGER attempts to address the hard problems inherent in connecting disparate clients, services, and networks over potentially unreliable communication substrates, in a manner that not only enables connectivity where none was present before, but in a way that enables efficient, effective, safe, and reliable information discovery and sharing. Acknowledging the plurality of types and structures of networks, services, applications, and missions, ROGER provides a gateway framework rather than a specific gateway. This framework supports building gateways that enable safe reach-back and reach-forward across a large set of heterogeneous networks and systems. By enabling the selection and configuration of pluggable, context specific components, ROGER supports the instantiation of gateways customized for particular deployments. Multiple gateways can be chained to provide reach-back and reach-forward across widely different and geographically dispersed networks.