ABSTRACT
The control plane of a tactical network determines its key capabilities, and in the last few years, multiple new control plane advancements have emerged, ranging from software-defined networking based tactical networks to AI-based tactical networks. Each control plane, be it one of the new control planes or a more traditional, fully distributed control plane such as OLSv2, has its advantages and limitations. For example, a traditional, fully-distributed control plane can be highly robust but lacks advanced capabilities such as efficiency and flexible quality of service control; a new, advanced control plane such as a software-defined, AI-based control plane can be highly efficient but can be less robust. It has become increasingly more challenging to evaluate, adopt and integrate recent tactical network control-plane advancements.
In this update, we (1) summarize major emerging use cases challenging existing tactical network control; (2) review the key benefits and issues of recent tactical network control plane advancements; (3) present the design and implementation of a new tactical network control architecture called Carbide, which, through the introduction of virtualization, distributed verification, and “horizontal” and “vertical” composition of multiple, heterogenous control planes, to allow the integration of recent control plane advancements to dramatically improve key tactical-network mission capabilities, including agility, robustness, and efficiency; and (4) provide a framework and initial results to benchmark recent advancements in realistic tactical-network settings.
BIOGRAPHY
Professor Patrick J Baker is currently the Head of Science for the Royal Air Force, Air Information Experimentation Division and is Principal Technical Consultant C4ISR for the UK Ministry of Defence – Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. Patrick until recently was the Scientific and Technical advisor to the United Kingdom, Land Environment Tactical Communications and Information Systems replacement programme – this is a 10 year £5 Billion pound Capability replacement programme. Patrick is also very active with Academia/Industry through the US/UK Distributed Analytics International Technology Alliance, where he is the Principal Technical Advisor – through this alliance he is currently co-authoring white papers in support of Software Defined Networking with a particular user case of Software Defined Coalitions with Yale University in the US and Imperial College in London. Patrick has a large cohort of directly mentored students from undergrad through to PhD – he is a formal PhD marker for Loughborough University in the UK – where, he holds a Visiting Professorship in Communications and Information systems. Patrick often lectures in communications systems and technologies across a wide breadth of Government, Academia and Industry. Patrick is often called upon to brief at the highest level – as an exemplar – early this year briefing General Terrance J O’Shaughnessy – USAF – Commander - United States Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defence Command on advances within Mesh Networking and applicability to military user cases. Patrick is also currently advising the Republic of Ireland Army on procurement of future Operational and Tactical Communications capability. Patrick has had an interesting career spanning over 36 Years, initially within the Royal Air Force where he served in a number of communications engineering roles including directly with NATO. On leaving the service he has gone on to work with Boeing Satellite systems in the US, The United Nations - Balkans, The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, Ericsson’s development centre in Sweden, Nokia’s development centre in Finland as examples. Patrick’s breadth of experience has enabled him to develop and deliver diverse solutions/capability from communications protocols/systems through to novel Bio-metric collection and transfer techniques. In 2011 he was awarded a Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Prime Minister award for outstanding work in support of Counter Improvised Explosive Device - Information Management and exploitation.

BIOGRAPHY
Professor Y. Richard Yang is a member of the Computer Systems Lab at Yale, where he founded and leads the Laboratory of Networked Systems (LANS). His research spans areas including computer networks, mobile computing, wireless networking, and network security. He led the P4P project (2008), which is the foundation for the establishment of the IETF Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) Working Group and related Internet standards. Systems based on ALTO have been deployed in large-scale, production networks such as Deutsche Telekom since 2016. He led one of the most comprehensive research studies of Internet traffic engineering (2004-2010), with adoption by ATT (domain backup 2007), Cisco (ISP multihoming, 2004), and Google (COPE, 2006). He led one of the first systematic analysis and design of network localization (2004-2006), establishing the systematic network localization theory. He is a core member of the team that designed and implemented the first massive MIMO system called Argos (2012). He is among the first to design systematic, high-level network programming languages (Maple in 2013 and Trident 2018). His research has received extensive citations and featured in mainstream media including Economist, Forbes, Guardian, Chronicle of Higher Education, Information Week, MIT Technology Review, Science Daily, USA Today, Washington Post, and Wired, among others. He has received many awards, including the US NSF CAREER Award, the Google Faculty Research Award, the Facebook Network Systems Award.R105