Achieving dynamic load distribution and balancing in tactical communications networks

摘要

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. 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. In this paper, we describe and demonstrate a network architecture which can simultaneously incorporate the dynamic nature of network topology and link quality at the Link Layer, and overcome the limitations of traditional single-cost function-based routing protocols at the Network Layer. By creating three custom models and simulating the proposed architecture in OPNET, the results demonstrate that this new approach offers a better QoS and dynamical distribution of traffic to all the available paths, which is crucial in tactical networks.