Routing Aspects on Soldier Node System

The Soldier Node, known as "Buret Krypto" in Swedish, will enable individual soldiers to encrypt/decrypt voice and data in a tactical environment. As a preparation for the procurement, it is important to check whether technical solutions exist that fulfill the requirements from the Swedish Armed Forces. The purpose of the report is to examine the consequences of different routing options in Soldier Node. To evaluate different routing options we have defined five network-specific use cases based on FM requirements on Soldier Node. The following three routing options are considered: (Host) The Soldier Node behaves in a similar way as a regular laptop connected to a network with an Ethernet interface; (Dual host) The Soldier Node behaves as two different hosts as seen from the IP network. It switches internally between preconfigured static routing tables depending on which interfaces are active; and (Router) The Soldier Node contains a router that runs dynamic routing protocols on all its interfaces. As Ra1570 does not fully support dynamical networks, it is not clear if all use cases are handled with Ra1570. A host solution does not fulfill the requirements on Soldier Node. We show that with sufficient preconfiguration, a dual host solution can handle all of the use cases described in the report, but has certain limitations, e.g., regarding unicast traffic. A router solution in Soldier Node has some attractive benefits, including: (1) routes are efficient, (2) the application IP address is independent of mobility, and (3) compatibility with other commercial routers in the network is good. It is, however, unclear whether a commercial router can be procured within the current time frame of Soldier Node, due to the restrictions on physical size and power consumption. Furthermore, it is not clear today whether the amount of administrative routing traffic can be sufficiently reduced to be feasible on a typical tactical mobile radio network. A noncommercial router, designed for low overhead in tactical environments, does not reduce the total overhead in a system that already has commercial routers.