DARPA Awards ATCorp Phase III BAA Contract to Further Develop TCP-Tactical

May 27, 2008 Eden Prairie, MN. Architecture Technology Corp (ATCorp) has been awarded a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Phase III BAA (Broad Agency Announcement) contract to further develop TCP-Tactical, a reliable transport protocol specifically designed for high-loss wireless networks. TCP-Tactical provides order-of-magnitude throughput increases to applications deployed in these high-loss, tactical wireless networks without modifying the application software or changing existing routing infrastructure.

Tactical networks are different because they commonly contain asymmetric and intermittent links not normally encountered in the commercial Internet. Security assurances are also mandated, which preclude TCP performance improvements that rely on changes to packets as they traverse the tactical network. These conditions and constraints can cripple the performance of “legacy” TCP, which assumes that a very small percentage of transmitted packets are lost due to packet corruption. Legacy TCP sees all packet losses as the result of network congestion — and responds by reducing an end-host's transmission rate. However, corruptive loss in a tactical network is commonplace, often as the result of RF signal loss.

TCP-Tactical addresses legacy TCP's poor performance issues. It is a replacement protocol stack that provides order-of-magnitude throughput improvements to TCP applications deployed in tactical environments. It optimizes tactical-network throughput on the fly by considering bandwidth, loss and latency metrics. TCP-Tactical is a software-only solution. Existing applications require no modification to benefit from TCP-Tactical's throughput improvements, and no routing-infrastructure changes are required.

TEST RESULTS TCP-Tactical is deployed at the network edges, where the network challenge occurs. Testing performed by DARPA's red team contractor has shown that when run over tactically challenged links, TCP-Tactical can achieve 4x-100x improvements over legacy TCP.