SECURE WIRELESS ARCHITECTURE FOR GROUND VEHICLES

US Army and Marine Corps tactical networking and command post programs have a widely-acknowledged critical need to improve mobility, including the objective of moving to mobile, vehicle-mounted command posts that can move hourly. The current state of the art for tent-based command posts requires hours of setup, which includes thousands of feet of copper wiring that delay network availability. To enable mobility for warfighting, the National Security Agency (NSA) established a program (with a set of guidelines) called “Commercial Solutions for Classified” (CSfC). CSfC-based mobility solutions have great potential to enable command post mobility and soldier dismounted situational awareness using ground vehicles as network nodes. However, the extensive requirements and processes involved are complex and not well understood. This paper compares various CSfC network architectures, and proposes several approaches for CSfC solutions optimized for mobility use cases. The paper further describes state of the art technologies suitable for such solutions.