Experiments with tactical network simulation, routing and management

We describe and analyze several results from a mixed ground/satellite tactical communication network simulation. On its own, the simulation is important as it provides a testbed for a wide range of simulated experiments. Our main results to date are in the areas of routing algorithms and packet retransmission protocols. We compare two routing algorithms and examine their tradeoffs in time efficiency and memory usage. A flood-search routing (FSR) algorithm is first examined, and then improved upon in an augmented flood-search routing algorithm that we call FSR+. FSR+ locally caches address information, providing greater message throughput performance than FSR. For two packet retransmission protocols ("go-back-N" and "selective repeat"), we analyze their performance under a wide range of varying parameters (e.g., bit error rate, packet size, etc.). Results include the effect of buffer size on throughput. Large buffer sizes hurt "go-back-N"'s performance but not "selective repeat"'s performance as bit error rate increases.