Robust Mobility Management Scheme in Tactical Communication Networks

Abstract

In a tactical communication network (TCN), it is important during military operations to provide timely and accurate information transmission. Accordingly, mobility management plays a key role in supporting the mobility and connectivity of mobile nodes (MNs). In battlefield environments, the intermediate nodes(INs), such as a backbone node or an access node, can due to enemy attack be partially or completely damaged. In order to solve these issues, different distributed mobility management (DMM) schemes have been introduced. However, the existing DMM schemes do not offer any efficient solution to maintain the ongoing communication sessions of MNs associated with a destroyed IN. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a robust mobility management scheme for TCNs. The proposed scheme not only enables the disconnected MNs to attach to a new IN, but by creating IP tunnels, also maintains their ongoing communication sessions. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme, we develop a physical test-bed environment. With the help of mathematical and experimental results, we show that the proposed scheme outperforms the legacy schemes in terms of service availability, network throughput, and first packet arrival time.