Goal and objectives

Within the overall theme of a secure but unclassified network for the war against terrorism, CITMO 2006 has the immediate objective of initializing a prototype network that will serve as a test bed for ideas and technologies.

As a basis for our work the UK Ministry of Defence has kindly provided us with a description of a concept named A Maritime Tactical Wide Area Network (MTWAN). While there are many similarities, we should bear in mind that MTWAN is a military network and what we want to accomplish also must adapt to a number of civil users. It is also our aim to apply commercial technology to solve very challenging interoperability and security issues in the support of coalition operations.

The Working Group themes have been adjusted to better fit our needs:

- WG 1: Quality Assurance (How do we get to level of quality assurance we need using IP v4 and/or v6? What is the level of quality assurance needed and how can we apply commercial tech to ensure this?)

- WG 2: Performance Requirements (What are the performance issues associated with using full deck of web services and/or service oriented architecture at the tactical level or for bandwidth disadvantaged users? What are the performance requirements at the tactical level and can commercial that be applied to reach these performance goals?)

- WG 3: Data Strategy (What type of data strategy is required for loose and/or rich coupling of communities of interest to allow rapid interoperability and trustworthy sharing at the data level? What are the commercial tools available to rapidly develop useful data strategies for rapid interoperability of old and new systems/sensors/users?)

- WG 4: Information Sharing (What are the commercial technologies available to ensure secure and unobtrusive use of the network? How do we share, even at unclassified level, what we want with each member of the net in a fully automated way across the internet but ensure that all potential intruders are not allowed into the network?)

We have some very interesting and challenging days ahead of us in our work to create rapid, smooth, secure, trustworthy interoperability between all participants in a coalition operation. Not least, we will do this, using commercial IT if and when it meets our requirements.