Experimental Evaluation of Group Communications Protocols for Data Dissemination at the Tactical Edge

Data dissemination is one of the fundamental requirements for any military network. Types of data include Situation Awareness data such as position reports, sensor data, and Commander's Operational Orders and Intelligence Reports. Different data types have different dissemination patterns and requirements. Some data types such as position reports are generated by each node and need to be received by every other node. On the other hand, sensor data is generated by a handful of nodes and may be needed by a subset of other nodes. Finally, orders and reports are generated by higher echelon nodes (e.g., a Headquarters node) and need to be disseminated down the command hierarchy. Group communications protocols typically handle dissemination of such data from multiple senders to multiple recipients. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a number of different group communications protocols for data dissemination. In particular, we evaluate the performance over an emulated tactical edge network using the Anglova scenario. Such an evaluation helps identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of these protocols when they operate in a challenged communications environment with limited capacity, variable latency, and unstable links.