Efficient Group- and Information-Centric Communications in Mobile Military Heterogeneous Networks

Author(s):

Christoph Barz, Hans-Georg Courté, Eelco Cramer, Sepideh Fouladgar, Anders Hansson, Mariann Hauge, Anne Marie Hegland, Arjen Holtzer, Kelvin M. Marcus, Andreas Martens, Levent Misirlioglu, Jan Nilsson, Markus Peuhkuri, Mathias Rautenberg, Eric Saliba, Niranjan Suri, Mauro Tortonesi, Bastiaan Wissingh, Luc Bonnafoux, Maggie Breedy, Lorenzo Campioni, Roberto Fronteddu, Alessandro Morelli, Cedric Nortier, Robert Seepers, and Ronald in ‘t Velt

Abstract:

This report documents the findings of NATO Science and Technology Organization Research Task Group IST-161. The aim of this group was to investigate potential solutions for group communications in mobile tactical networks to learn more about their behavior. Experiments were conducted using a realistic military scenario called Anglova that contains a battalion-sized mechanized unit comprising four companies. The group considered architectural aspects, introduced a group communications protocol taxonomy, and discussed security aspects. Experiments showed that the Generic Data Exchange Mechanism has the best overall performance in the tested scenarios, followed by DisService and ZeroMQ with NORM. So-called broker-based solutions, such as the Neural Autonomic Transport System (NATS), were shown to be unsuitable for the mobile tactical edge. An alternative approach called named data networking (NDN) was investigated. NDN proved to be insufficiently mature for the group’s use case, missing several essential elements in the protocol stack, including an efficient content synchronization mechanism. The IST-161 group maintained and extended the Anglova experimentation environment with new scripts and emulation models and produced eight scientific papers.