The purpose of the MITRE Minirouter project is to demonstrate the feasibility of using commercial products and open source software to create an on-the-move general purpose communications capability suitable for use in tactical environments.

The minirouter provides a standard internet protocol (IP) interface that can be used to connect any host computer running the standard internet protocol suite to one of several types of commercial or military satellite terminals. These terminals are chosen to be small, rugged, and capable of being mounted to a vehicle and operating while on the move. An example configuration using the MITRE minirouter software is illustrated below:

The minirouter currently supports interfaces with two commercial satellite terminals: ComTech and OmniTracs. Interfaces to military UHF satellite communications and the EPLRS tactical communication system are currently under development.

The minirouter code uses IP networking capabilities built in to the Linux operating system, together with a relatively small amount of "glue" code to provide the interface to the satellite system. The performance characteristics of the MTS and OmniTracs systems lend themselves to UDP-based applications more than to-TCP based applications. However, by using a special purpose TCP gateway from the SCPS project we have used the minirouter to successfully transfer small pages from a web server to a browser over the MTS system.