Testbed for Tactical Networking and Collaboration

Beginning in 2002, a team of Naval Postgraduate School researchers together with sponsors from the United States Special Operations Command USSOCOM, and later joined by the Office of the Secretary of Defense OSD and the Department of Homeland Security DHS ST Programs, started a new interagency experimentation program, which is now collectively known as the Tactical Network Testbed TNT Experiments. An observed general lack of synergy between military operators, government labs, industry, and the academic community in resolving increasingly complex problems of integrating and operating emerging technologies motivated the project. In the core of TNT experimentation is a unique testbed, which enables sustainability and evolution of the experimentation process. It provides for the adaptation and integration processes between people, networks, sensors, and unmanned systems. It enables plug-and-play tactical-on-the-move sensor-unmanned systems networking capabilities combined with global reachback to remote expert command sites and augmentation by rapid integration of applied research services. The goal for this paper is to describe an innovative interagency experimentation testbed environment which has evolved into a unique research service of social and information networking, enabling synergy of the military, academic, government, and industrial communities in designing, operating, and evaluating emerging self-organizing tactical networks as well as other related technologies.