Connectivity in mobile tactical networks

In today´s network-centric battlefield, the ad hoc style, self-organizing networks play a more and more important role in the operation of mobile forces that are deployed quickly to meet the tactical demands. However, the unique features of the tactical scenario also pose significant challenges for networking, which makes the existing research results for the general mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) difficult to be reused directly. In this paper, we focus on the connectivity issue of the mobile tactical networks (MTNs). To better describe the special formation-oriented mobility pattern of MTNs, a more realistic node-following mobility model is used, based on which the neighbor connectivity is obtained from both the geometrical and physical communication point of view for not only 1-D but also 2-D network scenarios. After that, we further evolve our recently proposed decomposition and recursion method to derive the end-to-end connectivity for some formations commonly used in the MTNs. All our analytical results are verified by extensive simulations. We believe that this work is able to shed new lights on the MTNs´ performance characteristics, which can be used for guiding the development of the next-generation MTNs.