An approach to measurement-based tactical radio modeling and real time emulation

Abstract

In the past years, the demand for data transmission in tactical radio networks has grown significantly. On the software side, increasingly complex C4I solutions are developed and radio networks have to cope with increasing amounts of network load. Heterogeneous solutions are required to satisfy the QoS requirements of end-user software. Military decision makers need to be able to assess the suitability and interoperability of various components when designing mission-critical network configurations. The usual approach to evaluating the feasibility of a given network and software configuration is field testing, which may involve significant effort and cost. While it may not be realistic that field testing can become obsolete in the near future, for some aspects of testing it may be feasible to rely on network models instead. In this paper, we present an initial approach to modeling and real time simulation of tactical radio links. This approach is going to facilitate large scale virtualized testing with the characteristics of actual military radios.