A Scheme for Improving the Communications Efficiency Between the Control Plane and Data Plane of the SDN-Enabled Airborne Tactical Network

Abstract

With the battlefield becoming more challenging, the aviation swarm is considered a promising organization of air combat forces to execute both combat and non-combat air missions. As a critical component of the aviation swarm, the airborne tactical network (ATN) provides the communications capability, enabling information sharing between both manned and unmanned military aircrafts as well as surface and ground platforms. The deficiencies of legacy ATNs, particularly their inability to meet the communications demands of the aviation swarm, motivated us to employ the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm to the ATN and to design an SDN-enabled ATN (SD-ATN) for the aviation swarm. For the SDN paradigm, the communications efficiency between the control plane and the data plane directly impacts the normal operations of the network, raising a fundamental problem of designing the SD-ATN, which is that how to ensure the QoS requirements of the non-elastic information transmitted between the control plane and the data plane (non-elastic C/D information) is met. To address this issue, a transmission framework is first proposed to make it practical to provide dedicated QoS guarantee for the non-elastic C/D information. Then, a communication protocol is designed based on the proposed framework, aiming at transmitting the non-elastic C/D information in a reliable and real-time manner. The simulation results show that, in the aviation environment, our scheme does improve the transmission efficiency of the non-elastic C/D information, which performs better than legacy solutions.