Rapid Interoperability with OverlAI Gateways

Using traditional development methods, interoperability between heterogeneous network and communications platforms takes significant time to develop and deploy. It would be useful to have added flexibility over which networks can interoperate in the mission planning cycle, which might be on the order of days. We present OverlAI Gateways, an alternative solution to hand-coded gateways allowing for rapid development of interoperability support at the networking layer through a combination of machine learning, modern software engineering practices, and relaxing the need for perfect interoperability. Using the OverlAI Gateway approach, our team developed interoperability between three ad-hoc wireless protocols, and we compared our implementations to existing implementations of those protocols as a baseline. Relative to a baseline, OverlAI Gateway implementations typically achieved over 90% of the packet delivery performance relative to the baseline while only requiring 27% of the amount of network code to be developed.