Physical Optics Corporation — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF161-053

Description

To address the Air Force need for a managed aerial layer network employing cloud capabilities, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to develop a new Cloud Aerial Layer Management (CALM) cloud architecture. This new architecture leverages and enhances commercial/Government off-the-shelf (COTS/GOTS) cloud components and delay-tolerant networking (DTN). Specifically, the innovation in cloud/network architecture enhancements will enable the aerial layer cloud to offer resources to ground, air, and space nodes in a challenging aerial environment. Connectivity and resources (e.g., storage, virtual servers, and system management) are reliably provided from resource pools with redundancy despite changing network connectivity due to node mobility, jamming, and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, and loss of SATCOM and terrestrial gateways. These specifications directly address the Air Force requirements for airborne layer network cloud computing with legacy and advanced communication links in interservice, interalliance operations. In Phase I, POC will demonstrate the feasibility of CALM by developing a system architecture, and demonstrating and delivering a laboratory instantiation, at TRL 4/ 5, serving the tactical edge user and other temporary and permanent users. In Phase II, POC plans to construct a demonstration, at TRL-6, of the aerial cloud layer with heterogeneous mobile nodes, multiple networks, and link adversity.