Understanding the delay and loss tradeoffs in large wireless military networks using queuing analysis and MAC models

To plan and adapt military network it is critical to understand the performance impacts of design decisions, such as the choice of topology, routing, queuing and admission control. For example, changing transmission powers, routing link costs, queue sizes, and traffic rates can dramatically affect QoS metrics such as delay and loss. Detailed simulations can give good insights into performance, but becomes infeasible for large networks with thousands of platforms, especially if decisions must be made quickly. Traditional steady state queuing analysis is scalable, but cannot handle the multi-tier military networks running: a) multi-interface wireless platforms with heterogeneous link rates, b) multi-class unicast and multicast flows, c) flows that may exceed network capacity, and d) diverse routing protocols. This paper proposes queuing models to estimate queuing delay and loss in large multi-tier wireless military networks. We describe the implementation of the model into the CNEDAT network design tool and show sample results for end-to-end delay and loss. Finally, we show possible delay and loss design tradeoffs for different queue size configurations.