TNT: A Tactical Network Test Platform to Evaluate Military Systems Over Ever-Changing Scenarios

Abstract

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) the automation of experiments to quantify the performance of military systems over ever-changing communication scenarios; and (iv) the monitoring of quantitative metrics 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 such as packet loss, delay, jitter, and data rate, and the test scenario characterization using mobility metrics such as speed, distance, and acceleration.

Keywords

• Testing tactical systems
• military systems
• ever-changing network scenario
• mobility models
• tactical networks