Military Communications and Information Technology: A Trusted ...

14 Military Communications and Information Technology...
and maintainability criteria provided for the project. In addition, extensibility and
easy customizability of the chosen COTS product is a big plus for an enterprise
level project.
For instance, instead of developing a SOA-based framework within this project,
AirC2IS enjoys the use of a world-wide accepted product, such as Microsoft’s
BizTalk Server (MS-BT) 2010 framework [1] to develop SOA-based integration with
external systems. For content management, collaboration and portal capabilities,
SharePoint Portal [2] solution is being used. There are also a few other complex
COTS products which have their own architectures. Therefore it is essential to also
consider the major COTS products’ architectures to have a better understanding
of the overall structure of the AirC2IS.
Fig. 2 lays out the general architecture, and also “zooms in” the COTS products’
basic architecture as well.
Figure 2. Software architecture utilizing COTS architecture
III. Overcoming challenges of multiple COTS usage
within a layered architecture
Using frameworks and other reusable libraries helps reducing design and
development efforts and increases the success of the final product. It also allows
reserving scarce project resources for effective development of critical mission
services.
On the other hand, system needs to be designed carefully to build an integrated
and easily manageable environment including such different components
each have its own (and different) architecture.