Mission Integration Network Control: DARPA's ambitious program for command and control

Historically the DoD approach to building communications systems models a vertically- integrated stack. Today both DoD and commercial approaches deconstruct this stack moving away from closed, rigid architectures to open, flexible solutions. Successful DARPA networking and information programs such as DyNAMO, SHARE, SoSITE, STITCHES, and Network UP have addressed various challenges associated with deconstructing the stack. Innovations from these efforts provide radio and message interoperability, customized data delivery, packet-level data security, and resilience via data and control plane separation.

MINC will culminate this paradigm shift from static, manual configuration of closed, rigid architectures by moving towards autonomous, mission-driven approaches where applications and networks adapt with mission dynamics and operator feedback. Within the MINC context, suboptimality may be tolerable providing that the right mission-critical information is delivered at the right time. This is in contrast to optimizing to deliver the greatest amount of data all of the time.

Figure 1. Today: Static networks in separate domains limit the ability to execute the mission and only allow limited to no movement of data across networks; Future: MINC will provide real-time, autonomous resource discovery and network orchestration to dynamically compose data pathways across multiple warfighting and networking domains to continuously adapt to meet mission needs

MINC is envisioned to create real-time autonomous resource discovery with on-demand network orchestration across domains, reference Figure 1. This is exemplified by an “always on” secure control overlay for network Command and Control (C2) that achieves backward and forward compatibility across networks, thus realizing connectivity between kill web services to share mission/application data. Another objective of MINC, as a real-time planning and execution capability, is an ability to jointly manage network configuration and information flows.

That was from DARPA’s broad agency announcement, Mission Integrated Network Control.

In essence, DARPA is looking to solve a fair chunk of the JADC2 concept with a capstone project. There are various programs that have their own command and control networking that are all configured differently and thus struggle to interoperate.

In my simpleton’s view, there’s a set of local area networks like we may have in a household or business. You can use a router to connect individual computers or LANs to a wide area network like the internet. But this requires standards to be built in from the start, something many defense programs do not have the benefit of.

Rather than manually modifying systems to some global standard (and lose tons of functionality along the way), each system has a virtualization layer that allows it to interact with a software-defined network. Users can see all the connected systems and their resources. Then, if a user wants to interact with two systems that didn’t communicate before, he or she could use a tool to autogenerate the translation between data formats.

I’ll be interested to learn more. Any technical interpretations would be welcome in the comments!