Abstract
Aviation swarm is considered to be a promising organization of air combat forces to execute combat and noncombat air missions. As a critical component of an aviation swarm, airborne tactical network (ATN) provides the communication capability. Considering the deficiencies of today’s ATNs, it is unable to meet the communication demands of an aviation swarm, which motivates us to employ the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm and design a SDN-enabled airborne tactical network (SD-ATN). For the SDN paradigm, network monitoring information (M-info) is the source of knowledge that forms the globe network view of the control plane; therefore, how to ensure that the control plane collects M-info from the data plane in a reliable and real-time way is a fundamental problem of designing the SD-ATN. To address this issue, a transmission framework called the MCF-SD-ATN is first designed, which makes it practical to provide dedicated quality of service (QoS) guarantees for the M-info collection. Then, a communication protocol called the MCP-SD-ATN is designed to implement the M-info collection work based on the MCF-SD-ATN. We implement the MCF-SD-ATN and the MCP-SD-ATN in EXata 5.1 for simulation. Simulation results show that the proposed solution is appropriate for M-info collection in the SD-ATN.
Highlights
With the development of technology and war concept, battlefield environment is becoming much more challenging
We elaborate the details of the MCP-SD-airborne tactical network (ATN)
We develop a global MCP-SDN-enabled airborne tactical network (SD-ATN) module for the SD-ATN controller and a local MCP-SD-ATN module for the platform controller to implement the operations of the MCP-SD-ATN, which are, respectively, performed by the SD-ATN controller and platform controller
Summary
With the development of technology and war concept, battlefield environment is becoming much more challenging Under this background, employing a swarm of the manned or unmanned aircraft with various warfare capabilities to cooperatively execute combat or noncombat air missions is paid much attention recently. The superiority of the aviation swarm relies on efficient collaborations among swarm members, requiring deep and extensive interactions among mission systems, weapon systems, and sensors carried on different aircraft. In such a context, a more efficient, more appropriate, and more adaptable communication capability is needed by the aviation swarm
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