Raytheon BBN Technologies

After Successful Phase One Simulation, BBN Technologies Awarded $8.7 Million in Defense Funding to Build and Demonstrate Disruption Tolerant Networking System

Cambridge, Mass., September 27, 2006 — BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, announced today it has been awarded $8.7M in funding by the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the second phase of its Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) program. The DTN system to be built by BBN will be capable of sending and receiving data reliably even when stable end-to-end paths do not exist. BBN was awarded the funding after successfully designing and simulating the network architecture in the first phase of the DARPA DTN program.

“The U.S. Military’s network needs are becoming more complex than traditional TCP/IP networks can handle,” said Tad Elmer, president and CEO, BBN Technologies. “The DTN we simulated delivered 100% of the transmitted data under the worst-case network disruptions, where the traditional end-to-end TCP/IP approach broke down completely and delivered no data at all.”

Traditional TCP/IP networks rely on stable end-to-end connectivity — an identifiable path all the way to the destination. In DoD’s wireless tactical networks, connectivity is often disrupted by factors such as terrain, weather, jamming, and movement or destruction of the nodes, making it impossible to predetermine a path and halting the flow of message traffic.

Under the parameters of the program’s second phase, BBN will create a robust deployable system prototype and demonstrate Disruption Tolerant Networking capabilities in a military-relevant vehicular network environment.

The current Internet model of locator-based access relies on strong connectivity to naming, caching and search infrastructure to deliver data successfully. In contrast, the system BBN will build will provide disruption-tolerant content-based access to information. For example, if a user wants to see a map of Baghdad that is no longer available via a network connection to a map server, his request could be satisfied by an accessible node that had previously stored the desired map.

A key aspect of the DTN is its ability to communicate opportunistically using episodically or intermittently available links. In the first phase of the project, BBN successfully organized information into bundles (a concept developed by the DTNRG, an Internet Research Task Force Working Group) rather than packets. Bundles are routed through “custodians” that augment the capabilities of traditional routers by persistently storing the bundles and then advancing the bundles to the next available node en route to their destinations. This opportunistic routing may require novel methods of advancing the information, such as using unmanned aerial vehicles to carry message traffic when there is an obstacle in the path — whether it is geographic or structural— or in the presence of an enemy threat. The result is a network that functions in the changing and unpredictable environments where reliable communications are most challenging and most critical.

About BBN Technologies
BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, is focused on solving some of the world's most pressing problems. From national security, information security, speech recognition and language translation, to integrating disparate systems and networks, BBN has been at the forefront of technological change for more than 50 years.

Known for pioneering the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, BBN continues to create advances in Internet and networking technologies through its work on ad hoc networking, the semantic Web, quantum communications, and advanced protocols. Building on its substantial list of firsts, BBN operates the first metro quantum cryptography network, the first real-time foreign broadcast monitoring system, and has developed the world's first stereoscopic digital mammography system. For more information on BBN Technologies, visit www.bbn.com.