radios (voice or data), especially in an international operation or one in which groups are brought together who have not trained or planned together before. Self-organizing networks that allowed smooth interoperation would be very useful in civilian and military crisis management and thus could have a high payoff for research. The lack of such technologies may be due partly to the absence of commercial applications requiring rapid configuration of wireless communications among many diverse technologies.

One purpose of the Department of Defense's (DOD's) Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstrations (JWIDs; discussed in Chapter 1) is to test new technologies for bridging gaps in interoperability of communications equipment. The SpeakEasy technology developed at Rome Laboratory, for example, is scheduled to be tested in an operational exercise in the summer of 1996 during JWID '96.⁴SpeakEasy is an effort sponsored by DARPA and the National Security Agency to produce a radio that can emulate a multitude of existing commercial and military radios by implementing previously hardware-based waveform-generation technologies in software. Such a device should be able to act as if it were a high-frequency (HF) long-range radio, a very high frequency (VHF) air-to-ground radio, or a civilian police radio. Managing a peer-to-peer network of radios that use different protocols, some of which can emulate more than one protocol, is a complex problem for network research that could yield valuable results in the relatively near term.

Network management helps deliver communications capacity to whoever may need it when it is needed. This may range from more effective sharing of network resources to priority overrides (blocking all other users) as needed. Network management schemes must support making decisions and setting priorities; it is possible that not all needs will be met if there simply are not enough resources, but allocations must be made on some basis of priority and need. Experimentation is necessary to understand better the architectural requirements with respect to such aspects as reliability, availability, security, throughput, connectivity, and configurability.

A network manager responding to a crisis must determine the state of the communications infrastructure. This means identifying what is working, what is not, and what is needed and can be provided, by taking into account characteristics of the network that can and should be maintained. For example, the existing infrastructure may provide some level of security. Then it must be determined whether it is both feasible and reasonable to continue to provide that level of security. Fault tolerance and priorities for activities are other characteristics of the network that must similarly be resolved.

In addition to network management tools to assess an existing situation, tools are needed to incorporate new requirements into the existing structure. For

Front Matter (R1-R14)

Overview and Summary (1-7)

Application Needs for Computing and Communications (8-54)

Technology: Research Problems Motivated by Application Needs (55-98)

Summary and Findings: Research for National-Scale Application (99-138)

Bibliography (139-142)

Appendixes (143-144)

A Workshop Series on High Performance Computing and Communications (145-155)

B Background--HPCCI and NII (156-157)

C Acronyms and Abbreviations (158-160)