Scalability Analysis of Tactical Mobility Patterns

Military networks are characterized by varying degrees and patterns of mobility. In this work, we consider the scalability of real-world mobile tactical networks, including the effects of protocols and bottlenecks, from a non-asymptotic viewpoint. Such analysis has been previously done for static networks [1], where the scalability of static scenarios was characterized by identifying the signature, which depends on the topology and traffic properties. We analyze the signature and scalability of a network consisting of two convoy groups moving according to the repeated traversal tactical mobility model. We observe that tactical mobility significantly reduces network scalability. Furthermore, we identify the instances in time where nodes of the network are loaded the most, preventing the network to scale to larger number of nodes. We demonstrate that this bottleneck instant depends on the routing algorithm considered. Finally, we demonstrate how the scalability is affected by the variation of network resources and traffic characteristics, and uncover significantly different trends compared with the static case.