SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE FOR COALITION SATELLITE COMMUNICATIONS

Communications interoperability between NATO and National forces is paramount in NATO deployments. In the recent past, the development of coalition inter networking agreements at strategic and deployed levels has been progressing at a steady pace. In the satcom domain, interoperability at the physical, media access and sometimes network layers, largely relies on adopting common modem waveforms, as recommended by NATO's STANdardisation AGreements (STANAGs). Having NATO and Nations following the same satcom STANAGs is the first step to enable coalition-wide interoperable satellite communications. Establishing a system-agnostic service management overlay on top, to facilitate cross-support services amongst NATO and National space and ground satcom assets, becomes the next logical step. Under this framework, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) shall allow users within NATO, as well as users in a coalition, to discover and invoke satcom transmission services, advertised and provided through NATO or National ground and space assets. This approach, which relies on the federation of satcom networks and services from NATO and Nations contributing to a deployment, is facilitated by the migration to NATO's Network Enabled Capability (NNEC), and in particular, to converged IP networking over heterogeneous satcom bearers. This paper describes a candidate architecture to implement cross-support satcom services, both over static anchors, and deployed satcom networks.