Design considerations in applying disruption tolerant networking to tactical edge networks

Amin, Rahul; Ripplinger, David; Mehta, Devanshu; Cheng, Bow-Nan

doi:10.1109/mcom.2015.7295460

“…From the network perspective (3), TNT creates an infrastructure that uses patterns of data rates change and mobility traces, simulating a wide range of network scenarios. These scenarios are deployed in a real test-bed or emulated environments in order to test a given military system (2). In this investigation, TNT is instantiated to deploy network scenarios in a test-bed with real military radios.…”

Section: The Tnt Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

TNT: A Tactical Network Test platform to evaluate military systems over ever-changing scenarios

Rettore¹,

Loevenich²,

Lopes³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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This paper addresses the challenge of testing military systems and applications over different communication scenarios with both network conditions and user data flows changing independently. We assume that systems developed to handle ever-changing communication scenarios are more likely to be reliable and robust during real military operations. Therefore, we propose the Tactical Network Test (TNT) platform to automate the evaluation of military systems and applications over real military radios using a reproducible test methodology. TNT has four main goals (i) the creation of QoS-constrained data flows; (ii) the execution of models to change network conditions; (iii) a performance evaluation of a military system over ever-changing conditions; and (iv) the monitoring and performing data analysis. Our platform was used to execute experiments in a VHF network by sending uniformly distributed data flows during seven different communication scenarios, either generated by a stochastic model or mobility models. The experimental results are used to discuss the military system's performance by quantitative analysis using network metrics and the test scenario characterization through mobility metrics.

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“…In this figure, TNT orchestrates the experiment by deploying all necessary scripts over the network nodes right before the experiment starts. After the user configures the experiment (as described earlier in Section III-A), TNT starts the experiment deploying (1) the application on the sender and receiver nodes (user data flows); (2) TABLE I: Experimental setup in the sender node, which has an interface with the radio and with the link disconnection prototype; (3) the military system (here the adaptive data flow shaping mechanism) on the sender node in order to avoid buffer overflow; and (4) the monitoring and data analysis which collect, prepare, processing and visualize the experiment outputs as describes later in this section.…”

Section: A Test Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

TNT: A Tactical Network Test platform to evaluate military systems over ever-changing scenarios

Rettore¹,

Loevenich²,

Lopes³

et al. 2021

Preprint

1

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper addresses the challenge of testing military systems and applications over different communication scenarios with both network conditions and user data flows changing independently. We assume that systems developed to handle ever-changing communication scenarios are more likely to be reliable and robust during real military operations. Therefore, we propose the Tactical Network Test (TNT) platform to automate the evaluation of military systems and applications over real military radios using a reproducible test methodology. TNT has four main goals (i) the creation of QoS-constrained data flows; (ii) the execution of models to change network conditions; (iii) a performance evaluation of a military system over ever-changing conditions; and (iv) the monitoring and performing data analysis. Our platform was used to execute experiments in a VHF network by sending uniformly distributed data flows during seven different communication scenarios, either generated by a stochastic model or mobility models. The experimental results are used to discuss the military system's performance by quantitative analysis using network metrics and the test scenario characterization through mobility metrics.

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“…R ADIO links at the edge of tactical networks are exposed to several sources of randomness that may impact the current link data rate [1]- [6]. For example, the sources of randomness are node mobility, type of terrain, physical obstacles, weather conditions, radio jamming by an adversary, physical/cyber attacks and so on.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantizing Radio Link Data Rates to Create Ever-Changing Network Conditions in Tactical Networks

Lopes

¹

,

Loevenich

²

,

Rettore

³

et al. 2020

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Several sources of randomness can change the radio link data rate at the edge of tactical networks. Simulations and field experiments define these sources of randomness indirectly by choosing the mobility pattern, communication technology, number of nodes, terrain, obstacles and so on. Therefore, the distribution of change in the network conditions is unknown until the experiment is executed. We start with the hypothesis that a model can quantize the network conditions, using a set of states updated within a time window, to define and control the distribution of change in the link data rate before the experiment is executed. The goal is to quantify how much variation in the link data rate a tactical system can handle and how long it takes to resume IP data-flows after link disconnections. Our model includes functions to combine patterns of change together, transforming one pattern into another, jumping between patterns, and creating loops among different patterns of change. We use exemplary patterns to show how the change in the data rate impacts other link metrics, such as latency and jitter. Our hypothesis is verified with experiments using VHF radios over different patterns of change created by our model. We compute the inter-packet latency of three types of IP data-flows (broadcast, unicast and overlay) to highlight the time to resume data-flows after long link disconnections. The experimental results also support the discussion on the advantages and limitations of our model, which was designed to test tactical systems using military radios.

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Design considerations in applying disruption tolerant networking to tactical edge networks

Cited by 29 publications

References 6 publications

TNT: A Tactical Network Test platform to evaluate military systems over ever-changing scenarios

TNT: A Tactical Network Test platform to evaluate military systems over ever-changing scenarios

TNT: A Tactical Network Test platform to evaluate military systems over ever-changing scenarios

Quantizing Radio Link Data Rates to Create Ever-Changing Network Conditions in Tactical Networks

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