Multipath Routing and Sensor-Wireless Scheduling to Reduce Latency and Packet Loss over Tactical Wireless Networks

Network latency reduces the reaction time available to an automated weapons system. In the past ten years, military networks have transitioned from dedicated circuit-switched full duplex communications to converged Internet Protocol (IP) time division multiple access (TDMA) networks focused on capacity and availability before latency and reliability. Three candidate solutions to improve performance with minimal hardware change include minimizing the sensor resource period to communications timeslot schedule and either implementing multipath routing at the network layer or implementing multipath routing at the transport layer. Improving the sensor to next available timeslot latency reduces end to end latency, but does not address survivability. Multipath routing at the network layer improves survivability through improved message completion rate, but the duplication of packets and additional route discovery decreases overall capacity and process switching is slower than hardware switching. Multipath routing at the application/transport layer incurs additional latency as packets travel through the network, encryption, and transport layers at each hop, but the application remains network agnostic. Together, multipath routing and modifications to timeslot scheduling improve reaction time and message completion rate. This paper provides a comparative analysis of message completion rate with respect to latency for six topologies and the three candidate solutions. Of the two multipath routing solutions, both show improvement in reaction time and survivability with differing costs to system design, development, and deployment.