Situation-Aware Survivable Network Design for Tactical Environments

Abstract

A tactical sensor network is a representative safety-critical environment that should satisfy strict guarantee of the requirements of tactical traffic. However, because of the lack of infrastructure in a military network environment, resource constraints on wireless channel and nodes can cause problems such as network congestion and packet collision. If critical tactical data is lost or does not arrive on time, it can degrade the efficiency of military operations and even threaten the survival of soldiers. To resolve this critical issue, we propose a situational backoff reset algorithm that utilizes a quality of service (QoS) field information to determine the priority of received tactical packets and control the deferral time of low-priority traffic. From a packet routing path connectivity perspective, we propose a branch node-based routing algorithm in order to provide a resilient path by excluding the isolated single path. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution can prioritize tactical traffic from the channel preemption perspective and construct a robust end-to-end path avoiding an isolated single path. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.