European Defence Industrial Development Programme.: EDIDP-AG: Cyber situational awareness and defence capabilities, military networks and technologies for secure communication and information sharing | CDE Almería – Centro de Documentación Europea

This call for proposals addresses the priority area “Cyber situational awareness and defence capabilities, military networks and technologies for secure communication and information sharing” of the EDIDP-AG subprogramme of the European Defence Industrial Development Programme.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an evolving network architecture that focuses on the separation of control and data planes. SDN addresses the fact that the static architecture of conventional networks is not well-suited to today’s high-bandwidth and very dynamic networking applications. SDN allows: (a) network behaviour to be controlled by software (programmability); (b) the creation of logically centralised network topologies which enable the intelligent control and management of resources; (c) the abstraction of services and applications from the underlying technologies; and (d) vendor-neutral networking infrastructure and openness.

SDN-enabled network architectures require reliable and high data rate communication between the network devices (SDN switches) and the SDN controller. Tactical networks on the other hand, may offer low rate and unreliable wireless links between highly mobile nodes. It is thus clear that, although SDN can offer significant benefits to tactical communications, a tactical network relying on SDN technologies will need to be very different from a typical civilian deployment as we know it today.

Objectives

Proposals shall address the feasibility and design of SDN-enabled networks suitable for tactical use. All of the following areas should be covered:

Network technologies, topologies and protocols suitable for tactical SDN-enabled networks;
Requirements that should be applied to the corresponding tactical SDN controller;
Use of Software Defined Radio (SDR) wireless nodes integrated in SDN-enabled tactical networks;
Power, bandwidth and storage requirements and trade-offs of tactical SDN switches and controllers;
Cyber security requirements, threats and counter-measures for tactical SDN-enabled networks;
Demonstration of a SDN testbed that will allow the evaluation of SDN concepts in representative tactical scenarios from a technical and operational point of view.