Creating Ever-changing QoS-constrained Dataflows in Tactical Networks: An Exploratory Study

This paper describes an exploratory study on how to generate sequences of QoS-constrained messages to challenge the underlying store-and-forward mechanisms in tactical networks. The messages come from Command and Control (C2) systems deployed at the tactical edge and the goal is to create reproducible flow of messages with a certain degree of entropy (randomness). Given a mission/operation, we assume that the user-facing services from C2 systems are related to each other and reuse a stochastic model to generate the sequence of messages; here called QoS-constrained dataflows. We studied the system behavior dealing with three different sequences of messages (A
₁
, A
₂
and A
₃
) to illustrate the computation of metrics using cross-layer contextual information and to highlight the importance of testing tactical systems with different loads. We also compute metrics to characterize the dataflows such as time in the queue, minimum datarate, number of expired messages and so on. Moreover, we used three disruptions patterns in the network to study the sequence of messages being divided in groups so to illustrate and support general conclusions about dataflow characterization. We claim that our methodology can get closer and closer to the performance bounds of store-and-forward mechanisms in tactical networks and can be reproduced by other researchers for quantitative comparisons.