Planning & design of routing architectures for multi-tier military networks

Design and planning Military networks requires complex cost-performance trades involving several functions ranging from subnet creation, topology generation, routing hierarchy design & protocol choice, waveform and frequency planning and MAC choices. In this paper we focus on a subset of the design problems pertaining to routing architecture design with unit task organization (UTO) requirements that are critical to military networks. As illustrated in this paper, the choice of routing architecture includes choice of subnets, routing areas and gateways involves complex cost-performance trades. To this end we use a MANET network design toolset Cognitive Network Engineering Design Analytic Toolset (CNEDAT) [1], which is an outcome of a joint project between ACS and US Army CERDEC. CNEDAT is an analytic design tool with a rich set of analytical models for algorithms and protocols for heterogeneous, multi-tier Military Networks. CNEDAT can be used both to: (a) generate/synthesize alternative network designs/plans given a set of network resources, objectives and constraints, by orchestrating various combinations of Waveform, MAC, and network algorithms & protocols, and (b) analyze the resulting network performance to provide options for suitable network stacks and architectures to meet mission objectives. We present in this paper, planning and design of routing architectures that greatly impact network performance and thus play a major decision role while designing and deploying military networks.