Evaluation of a multi-hop airborne ip backbone with heterogeneous radio technologies

  • Authors:

  • Bow-Nan Cheng;Randy Charland;Paul Christensen;Leonid Veytser;James Wheeler

  • Affiliations:

  • MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, USA;MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, USA;MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, USA;MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, USA;MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the first ACM MobiHoc workshop on Airborne Networks and Communications
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the DoD to build an on-demand airborne network for communications relay utilizing high capacity, long-range military radio systems. While these systems operate well in a network of homogeneous systems, platforms generally employ multiple heterogeneous radio systems making internetworking difficult due to varying radio characteristics and lack of interoperability. Although simulations and emulation tests can provide a baseline for how systems will perform in a controlled environment, field-tests are crucial to demonstrate capabilities in real-world operating environments. In this paper, we present measurement results from a field test involving two airborne platforms forming a dynamically routed aerial IP backbone over 200 nautical mile (Nm) with various radio systems as part of the C4ISR 2010 exercise. We present measurements results on per link performance, radio-to-router interface performance, and multi-hop network performance results with prototype software on open source platforms.