In the Design of Tactical Communication Systems

In order to provide versatile and reliable transport of data, voice and video traffic, military organizations deploy complex, integrated communications systems that combine terrestrial, airborne, and space-based platforms. These tactical communication systems, typically wireless networks, interface with COTS routers at the sub-network boundaries. The wireless sub-systems employed are susceptible to time-varying link quality resulted from dynamically changing network conditions. Additionally, the system may also be subject to the anti-access area denial (A2AD) attacks. In these situations, routers must measure the quality of the wireless links to enforce the QoS policy. Should the link degrade, routers redirect some or all of the traffic to alternative paths. This requires communication systems to support resilient centralized command, distributed control, and decentralized execution, and to date no COTS routers capable of routing traffic based on the traffic's characteristics. In this paper, we describe and demonstrate an application-centric network architecture which can appropriately respond the dynamic nature of network topology and link quality at the Link Layer, and can overcome the limitations of conventional single-cost function-based routing protocols at the Network Layer. This architecture has been simulated via OPNET and the results clearly demonstrate that this new approach to routing offers a better QoS and dynamical distribution of traffic to all the available paths, which is crucial in tactical communication systems.