NATO Core Services profiling for Hybrid Tactical Networks — Results and Recommendations

The NATO Research Task Group IST-150 "NATO Core Services profiling for Hybrid Tactical Networks" had Federated Mission Networking (FMN) as the main context and motivation for its work. IST-150 intended to investigate Core Services at the tactical level, and provide recommendations for future spirals of FMN targeting the tactical level. Specifically the Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) Core Service was investigated through an experimental approach. Our work should be taken both as input to future FMN spirals as well as continuing IST research task groups where MOM services play a role. This paper summarizes our findings on publish/subscribe, introduces new recommendations for the use of request/response, and discusses the potential impact these findings have on the future development of FMN. We recommend the following for tactical federated systems: Using the industry standard MQTT for publish/subscribe, and replacing HTTP/TCP in REST-based services with CoAP for request/response services. This paper summarizes the highlights of our work exploring these facets of MOM.