Network on Target: Remotely Configured Adaptive Tactical Networks

Abstract : The emerging tactical networks represent complex network-centric systems, in which multiple sensors, unmanned vehicles, and geographically distributed units of highly mobile decision makers, transfer and analyze data while on the move. The network could easily scale up to hundreds of cooperating nodes, providing tactical extension to the system-of-systems environment of Global Information Grid. The node mobility as well as ad hoc network topology reconfiguration becomes a powerful control option, which network operators or intelligent management agents could apply to provide for self-forming, self-healing behavior. This in turn requires new techniques for adaptive remote management of mobile wireless nodes; their rapid remote or autonomous reconfiguration at both physical and application layers, subject to changing operational requirements.