Exploring Performance Trade-offs in Tactical Edge Networks

Tactical edge networks are characterized by wireless links that have limited capacity and are prone to disconnection. In such a challenging and hostile environment, replication of information could be desirable as it increases information availability through redundancy and accessibility through proximity. However, replication of information has a negative effect on security because it broadens the attack surface -- more nodes may be targeted to obtain sensitive information, thereby potentially increasing the overall risk of the information being compromised or leaked. Furthermore, replicating information takes away resources (particularly communications and power, but also to some extent computation and storage) from other tasks that might also need the same resources. These trade-offs between information availability, information protection, and resource utilization exist and need to be explored in the context of different solutions that could be applied to the challenging problem of information dispersal for assured operations in tactical environments.