Mission Critical Resiliency with IRON

The Intrinsically Resilient Overlay Network (IRON) architecture and implementation demonstrates that backpressure forwarding is a viable and beneficial technique for increasing capacity and resilience in real-world networks. IRON brings together numerous academic research papers into a working system that provides latency-bounded, prioritized, resilient network forwarding. IRON was previously demonstrated on wired IP networks in a bare-metal testbed. This work focuses on porting IRON into an emulated heterogeneous network spanning space, air, and land domains using a variety of transport networks (RF, SATCOM, and IP-over-fiber). Experimentation demonstrates that IRON improves the packet receive rate by as much as 164% and successfully ensures delivery of the most critical flows, even during link outages. Reactions to changes in the network (including link outages or capacity changes due to attacks or congestion) occur within milliseconds with no human involvement.