Vencore, Inc. was awarded an $11.8 million contract by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research projects Agency (DARPA) through its applied research organization, Vencore Labs, to bolster the resiliency and reliability of the military’s IP networks, the company said on June 30.

The contract work is a component of DARPA’s Edge-Directed Cyber Technologies for Reliable Mission Communication (EdgeCT) program. A key objective of EdgeCT is to mitigate a range of cyber communication failures and attacks in real time, Vencore said.

“By its own definition, DARPA is looking for truly ‘revolutionary advances’ in this area. In this cyber application, we will be using our particular expertise in mission-aware networking and edge-based resilient communications to develop breakthroughs on several fronts,” Steve Omick, president of Vencore Labs, said in a statement,

The company explained focal points of the work includes techniques for automated discovery and characterization of degraded network performance, techniques for assigning network resources to communications in a distributed and globally-optimal fashion, and techniques for providing edge-based resilience for critical communications by dynamically altering protocol stack configurations in response to changing network conditions.

Vencore Labs is a performer in Technical Area One (TA1) of the EdgeCT program under the contract. TA1 focuses on “developing an end-to-end system that integrates revolutionary technologies for real-time network analytics, holistic decision systems, and dynamically-configurable protocol stacks to mitigate the effects of core network disruption for critical communications,” Vencore said.