1. XMPP Tactical Chat Don McGregor (mcgredo at nps.edu)
Don Brutzman (brutzman at nps.edu)

2. Military Chat Chat is used for a lot of things in the military:
• Navy bridge to bridge comms
• Logistics support
• Mission planning
In theory it’s not an official command & control link--in reality it is

3. Military Chat: Standards
Chat grew from the bottom up; individual commands and organizations “unofficially” deployed it.
This means there was no initial standards or design effort; lots of incompatible chat systems out there
There may be other problems: unaudited code, no authentication of users/roles, etc

4. Military Chat Human factors is huge and unexplored
• Often one user monitoring dozens of chat rooms; designated guy to monitor chat
• Vigilance task, which humans are notoriously bad at; “sit here and wait for something to happen”
• How do we scale to very large numbers of people in a chat room?
• The military uses chat for different things than the public; often goal-oriented rather than open-ended
• Multi-level security, coalition security, etc.

5. Military Domain-Specific Chat
Right now many chat clients attempt to be general purpose. But why shouldn’t we have different chat applications for different tasks?
When working in a 2,000 user chat room, use an application that does that well.
When working w/ something that requires vigilance, have an app that alerts you to new data
Platoon leader can’t be heads down in a firefight; have an implementation that does voice or audio from a PDA
AUV Workbench uses embedded chat

6. XMPP
XMPP has been adopted as the mandatory standard for chat by the DoD IT Standards Registry; no other chat protocol has been approved
Open standards and open source implementations

7. XMPP XMPP IDs are very similar to mail addresses
etc
The usernames can be tied to existing enterprise LDAP user databases
No one grand user database for all of XMPP--each server maintains its own user database

8. XMPP Server-to-Server XML Comms on TCP 5269 XMPP Server XMPP Server
TLS encrypted
XML stream on
Port TCP 5222
Client
Client

9. XMPP
JFCOM has been working on a military, multi-level security XMPP client implementation, Transverse
Translation, coalition features, etc

10. XMPP as Comms Backplane
Since XMPP is XML and distributes messages well, why not use this capability to have devices talk to each other?
Distributed Interactive Simulation--use XMPP as a data bridge for real-time data
JTC--use XMPP as a planning tool, sending maps and drawings across XMPP

11. XMPP Shared Chatroom Blackboard Device w/ JID XMPP XML-Enabled
Communications
Backplane
Device
User

12. JTC
JTC uses XMPP chat rooms as shared blackboards to pass information:
• Conventional chat
• Specify map regions
• Collaborative map modification

13. XMPP: Conclusions The standard provides a platform on which to build
Focus should now shift to using the standard to solve problems
DoD should encourage innovation at the application level; it is much too early to standardize or limit XMPP-enabled applications