Antenna assignment for JALN HCB

Joint Aerial Layered Network (JALN) could provide crucial communication links when milsatcoms are degraded, or lost. In order to effectively evaluate the network performance of JALN, the Joint Assessment Research/ Reference Testbed (JART) modeling of the JALN consists of a scoping model GCM and high fidelity EMANE model. The scoping model GCM performs a coarse analysis of network performance, and provides the network configurations for EMANE. However, there still exist some gaps that the GCM cannot provide all required configurations for EMANE. For example, how can we assign the antennas to JALN High Capacity Backbone (HCB) links where each JALN aircraft has four mounting points for directional antennas? The goal of this work is to develop an optimal antenna assignment algorithm for JALN HCB. Since link availability is the most important metric for JALN HCB, the antenna assignment can be formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem where the objective function is to maximize the link availability of the worst link or to achieve the max-min fairness. Due to NP-hardness of MILP problem, a greedy algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. The obtained antenna assignment can be used as the configuration for EMANE. Numerical experiments are used to show the performance of the MILP and greedy methods.