Agnostic Protocol Translation for Cross-Domain Information Sharing

Network translation gateways can provide seamless interoperability among different airborne, ground and maritime domains. Effective interconnection between waveforms and protocols through the gateways requires manual intensive development and specialized protocol expertise. Therefore, enabling building versatile gateways that can effectively translate those protocols across different network domains is of utmost importance to improve system interoperability. High-level domain specific languages have been utilized to support agnostic protocol interoperability. However, protocol-specific knowledge specification, the core of protocol translation, is still left to protocol experts with manual coding without advanced tools in support of simplification, guidance or verification. Such a manual and unsupervised method of generating translation logic is complex, time-consuming and error-prone. In order to overcome these problems with much more productive gateway development, we present a novel, visual protocol-agnostic translation toolkit in this paper. This toolkit offers three advanced features: 1) simple, intuitive visualized specification of protocol-specific knowledge, 2) graph-based translation logic verification, and 3) automatic gateway generation. The first two features have not been addressed in currently available protocol translation solutions.