Employing concepts of the SDN paradigm to support last-mile military tactical edge networks

The future battlefield tends to be populated by a plethora of “intelligent things”. In some ways, this is already a reality, but in future battlefields, the number of deployed things should be orders of magnitude higher. Networked communication is essential to take real advantage of the deployed devices on the battlefield, and to transform the data collected by them into information valuable for the human warfighters. Support for human decision making and even a level of autonomy, allowing devices to coordinate and interact with each other to execute their activities in a collaborative way require continuous communication. Challenges regarding communication will arise from the high dynamics of the environment. The network adaption and management should occur autonomously, and it should reflect upper-level decisions. The large scale of the network connecting high-level echelons, troops on the field, and sensors of many types, beside the lack of communication standards turn the integration of the devices more challenging. In such a heterogeneous environment, many protocols and communication technologies coexist. This way, battlefield networks is an element of paramount importance in modern military operations. Additionally, a change of paradigm regarding levels of autonomy and cooperation between humans and machines is in course and the concept of network-centric warfare is a no way back trend. Although new studies have been carried out in this area, most of these concern higher-level strategic networks, with abundant resources. Thus, these studies fail to take into account the “last-mile Tactical Edge Network (TEN) level,” which comprises resource constrained communication devices carried by troopers, sensor nodes deployed on the field or small unmanned aerial vehicles. In an attempt to fill this gap, this work proposes an architecture combining concepts from software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm and the delay-tolerant approach to support applications in the last-mile TEN. First, the use of SDN in dynamic scenarios regarding node positioning is evaluated through a surveillance application using video streaming and Quality of Experience (QoE) measures are captured on the video player. We also explore the election of nodes to act as SDN Controllers in the TEN environment. The experiments use emulator for SDN with support to wireless networks. Further investigation is required, for example, considering security requirements, however the results are promising and demonstrate the applicability of this architecture in the TEN network scenario.