An Environment for Tactical SDN Experimentation

Abstract

Military tactical networks must support critical mission requirements in austere operational environment. These networks must deal with the effects of mobility, intermittent link state, and variable bandwidth in the presence of adversaries. An open problem is the dynamic configuration of these networks despite the extreme challenges posed by tactical environments. New studies suggest that the application of Software Defined Networking (SDN) concepts may partially address this problem. An experimentation testbed that captures the characteristics of the tactical operating environment while integrating SDN methodologies to control network behavior is valuable for assessment of SDN concepts over military tactical networks. However, to date we have not found any test environments that adequately model SDN and tactical military environments. In this paper we present a tactical SDN testbed that combines virtualization services, network emulation, and SDN technologies to address these requirements making it suitable for experimentation and analysis of SDN deployed within tactical scenarios.