Building a versatile testbed for supporting testing and evaluation of tactical network management tools and their interoperability

In this paper we describe ongoing work and a roadmap for developing enabling technologies to support testing and evaluation of tactical network management tools and their interoperability. Future tactical networks are mobile ad hoc networks, which greatly enhance network responsiveness but significantly increase network operations complexity. Due to the dynamic nature of such networks, testing and evaluation of functional correctness and communication performance of network management tools is a challenge. In addition, it is necessary to ensure that future tactical networks will be seamlessly integrated with each other and with existing military networks. To enable high-fidelity testing and evaluation of management tools and of their interoperability prior to costly and time-consuming field testing, we are developing technologies that can seamlessly integrate simulated networks, emulated networks, and real network devices into a virtual tactical network as a testbed. The goal of the testbed is to allow easy setup of different virtual tactical networks that behave like real networks, so that software tools for tactical networks can be effectively tested and evaluated.