POF-Based Dynamic Control in Wireless Tactical Networks

In tactical networks, link fluctuations and node movements make operation management a difficult problem. Software-defined networking (SDN) has the ability to manage wired networks, but for tactical networks, SDN faces challenges arising from unreliable transmission and inefficient operation of wireless links. Moreover, protocols in wireless tactical networks are heterogeneous to implement different tasks, while the existing Openflow protocol cannot handle such protocol heterogeneity. In this paper, we proposed a reliable dynamic control architecture based on protocol-oblivious forwarding (POF) in the wireless tactical network, which can increase the reliability of the control plane and the communication performance between switches of the data plane. Based on the proposed architecture, we customized a routing protocol, which can make data forwarding more efficient. Finally, we build a test platform based on Raspberry Pi to validate the architecture of the proposed architecture. The results demonstrate the proposed architecture achieves desired performance in dynamic tactical environments.