Challenges and design principles of large scale tactical network architecture.

Abstract

Modern tactical communications systems are moving towards Internet-style system architectures to support information sharing for improving overall mission effectiveness. Development of such large scale communications systems presents various system design challenges. Research works discussed in this thesis are motivated by the technical challenges commonly encountered during the development of several large scale communications systems and proposes system-level design principles in overcoming these technical challenges. The first part of this thesis addresses system-level quality of service issues by modeling and simulation of an afloat wide area network system architecture. This simulation study investigates the system performance of real-time applications and provides quality of service design recommendations. The second part of this thesis proposes a consolidated network architecture for designing an afloat local area network system. A simulated prototype system is developed to investigate the system performance trade-off in the proposed consolidated network architecture. The third part of this thesis proposes an automatic dynamic resource management system architecture to efficiently manage shared computing resources in resource-constrained network environments without any human operator intervention. Test results in this experimental study demonstrates improved network performance when a communications system employs the automatic dynamic resource management software. Finally, the last part of this thesis proposes a reliable data aggregation and dissemination framework for tactical communications systems operating in disruptive networking environments with intermittent network connectivity. A prototype system is developed and implemented to demonstrate that the proposed framework can ensure reliable data delivery which is beneficial to the current and future development of tactical communications system architectures. This thesis makes several significant research contributions in designing a large scale communications system. First of all, the thesis suggests a simulation methodology for developing simulation models to study the performance of a large scale communications system and makes recommendations on system-level quality of service design. Secondly, the thesis reduces the complexity of future communications system design by proposing a consolidated system architecture. Thirdly, an automatic dynamic resource management software prototype is developed to alleviate resource contention issues commonly found in the tactical networking environments. Fourthly, a reliable data aggregation and dissemination framework is proposed and its function is demonstrated. The proposed framework can accurately infer meaningful messages from a large sensor data set and can reliably deliver the messages to the appropriate network destinations. Finally, the thesis organizes all of these relevant system-level design experiences and recommends system design principles for developing future large scale communications systems.