Creating and Handling Ever-changing Communication Scenarios in Tactical Networks

Abstract

Tactical networks may deal with unexpected conditions in both kinetic (an adversary) and digital (cyberwarfare) domains. Experiments in the literature lack the element of surprise (randomness) and the dynamic nature of such environments in both users' behavior (e.g. varying QoS-constrained data-flows) and network conditions (e.g. random variations among network states). Therefore, in this paper we propose a model to create ever-changing communication scenarios with dynamic users' behavior (problem A) and changing network conditions (problem B). Then the challenge is to handle the user generated data-flows $A$ given the current network conditions $B$ (problem $A\vert B)$ . To solve the problem $A\vert B$ we decoupled the functional blocks from a services taxonomy into two enforcement points in/out and one control point. This model was used to sketch a robust control loop to shape user data-flows relying on cross-layer information exchange. A quantitative analysis over simulated results is discussed to highlight both utility and limitations of our solutions for the three problems A, B and $A\vert B$ .